2324 Sch.R S gu 
THE ee 


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Received M anth a | (407 








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Theological Encyclopedia. 


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THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF SALVATION. 


By GEORGE BARKER STEVENS, 
Pu.D., D.D., LL.D. 





INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY 





oe CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 
4 OF SALVATION 


BY 


GEORGE BARKER STEVENS: 
Pe), DD. LED: 


DWIGHT PROFESSOR OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY IN 
YALE UNIVERSITY 


C 


NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
1905 





Norwood ress 
J. 8. Cushing & Co. — Barwick ik Suile Oae 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 





TO 


JULIUS KAFTAN, D.D., 


PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY 
OF BERLIN 


AND TO 


EUGENE MENEGOZ, D.D. 


DEAN OF THE THEOLOGICAL FACULTY IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF PARIS 


I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 
IN CORDIAL 


REGARD AND GRATITUDE 





PREFACE 


THE aim of the present work is to present a biblical, 
historical, and constructive discussion of the Christian 
doctrine of salvation. The theme has been regarded and 
treated primarily as a subject of investigation. I have 
accordingly approached it from the historical side, and 
have aimed to state the problems to be considered and 
to define my positions respecting them in an historical 
and inductive method. I have tried to judge the various 
opinions reviewed and to test my own by means of the 
fundamental Christian concepts of God and of man. 

The treatment has been made as objective as possible. 
It has been my aim to describe and estimate conflicting 
theories with fairness. My own judgments, with the 
reasons for them, have been frankly given. It is not to 
be expected, of course, that they will commend them- 
selves to the acceptance of all readers, but I trust that 
those who may dissent from them may still find some- 
thing in the book by which they may be interested or 
instructed. 

The present discussion presupposes a general knowl 
edge of Biblical Theology and of the History of Christian 
Doctrine, such as is furnished by the relevant sections of 
my Theology of the New Testament and Professor Fisher’s 
EMistory of Christian Doctrine, earlier volumes of the 
International Theological Library. 


Vii 







vill PREFACE 


I cannot more appropriately indicate my 
toward the results which I have reached 
ue the words with which Anselm closes his dis 
same subject: “Si quid diximus quod e 








CONTENTS 


PART. I 


THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Tue SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM . A : i E : ‘ ; 1 
CHAPTER II 

Tue PropHeTic DocTRINE OF SALVATION = 2 ~ Sea 


CHAPTER III 


Tue TEACHING OF JESUS ACCORDING TO THE SYNOPTIC 


GOSPELS. é z 5 a é 2 sourkt ce : pe) 
CHAPTER IV 

THE PAvuLINE DocTRINE . - - - : ° ° we Oe: 
CHAPTER V 

Tue DoctrRINE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS - eG 
CHAPTER VI 

THE JOHANNINE DOCTRINE : : : - : . snnge 


CHAPTER VII 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS . E F = < - 5 aul 


PARE EE 
THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 
CHAPTER I 


' 
THE ComMMERCIAL THEORY OF ANSELM . s F SBS 
ix 


x CONTENTS 


CHAPTER II 


Ture GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF GROTIUS . ° < : 


CHAPTER III 


MoperN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES ; - = : 


CHAPTER IV 


Mopern Ernricat SATISFACTION OR ErnicizeED GOVERN- 
MENTAL THEORIES 4 ; ‘i : . - A - 


CHAPTER V 


Mopern “SUBJECTIVE” THEORIES . : = : a S 


CHAPTER VI 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS - . . . . . . 


PART III 
CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


CHAPTER I 


Tue CHRISTIAN Concept OF Gop . “ : . . . 


CHAPTER II 


Tue PERSONALITY OF THE SAVIOUR ; - : 5 = 


CHAPTER III 


Tue SIN FROM WHICH JESUS SAVES. c ; : a = 


CHAPTER IV 


Tue NATURE AND ENnps or PUNISHMENT : 2 = = 


CHAPTER V 


Tue ForGIVENESS OF SINS . : 4 : : : ‘ 


198 


221 


239 


262 


287 


304 


322 


340 


CONTENTS al 


CHAPTER VI 


Tue RELATION OF CHRIST TO MANKIND . : : : s One 


CHAPTER VII 


Tue RELATION OF CHRIST TO HumMAN SIN. 3 : 5» Sites 


CHAPTER VIII 


Tue Necessity oF Curist’s DEATH : : ‘ ; - 396 


CHAPTER IX 


Tue SATISFACTION OF GOD IN THE WORK OF CHRIST . . 414 


CHAPTER X 


ETERNAL ATONEMENT i : p 4 A 5 : - 433 


CHAPTER XI 


SALVATION BY UNION WITH CHRIST : : : F «  AdL 


CHAPTER XII 


Tur CHRISTIAN CHARACTER. q é Macs. : . 470 


CHAPTER XIII 


SALVATION AND THE KinGpom oF Gop . - . 2 - 492 


CHAPTER XIV 


SALVATION AND Human DEsTINY . : : : - 509 
CHAPTER XV 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS : A Be oA f - a) O29 


GENERAL INDEX é A : ¢ f : A 5 Dal 


INDEX OF TEXTS 5 5 : F ; J - : = woes 








THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 
OF SALVATION 


PART I 


THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


CHAPTER I 
THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM 


THE historical study of Christian doctrine should begin 
in the Old Testament. There we must seek the germs of 
which that teaching is the full development. Accordingly, 
in undertaking an investigation of the Christian doctrine 
of salvation, it is necessary, first of all, to glance back at 
the Jewish religion and seek for the points of contact 
between it and its fulfilment in the gospel. The New 
Testament constantly assumes a genetic connection be- 
tween Judaism and Christianity. Its writers unfold 
their teachings in terms more or less distinctly Jewish 
and with frequent reference to the Old Testament 
thought-world. 

For our present purpose, two inquiries respecting the 
Old Testament are especially pertinent. The first con- 
cerns the religious import of the priestly, or sacrificial 
system; the second relates to the prophetic conception of 
the nature and conditions of salvation. Legalism and 
prophetism are the two most prominent features of the 
Jewish religion. They existed side by side and acted and 
reacted upon each other. In important respects they were 

: it 


2 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


rival forces. Both have had their effect in the genesis 
and development of Christian doctrine. To a considera- 
tion of the religious import of these two forces the present 
chapter and the following one will be devoted. 

It should, however, be made distinctly clear in advance, 
that the historic connection between the Old and the New 
Testaments to which I have referred, does not warrant the 
conclusion that Old Testament ideas, as such, are directly 
normative for Christian belief. The New Testament does 
not sustain any such supposition. Christianity is the ful- 
filment, not the republication, of Judaism. The more 
systematic writers of the New Testament, such as the 
apostle Paul and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
insist upon the rudimentary character of the Old Cove- 
nant, in consequence of which its teaching and practices 
fall below the Christian plane of moral and spiritual truth. 
To Christian thought Judaism represents an earlier stage 
of revelation. It is preparatory and provisional, and there- 
fore imperfect. It furnished, indeed, the historical basis 
of Christianity, but the two are not identical, nor is the 
former an adequate test and measure of the latter. In 
important particulars they are even radically different. 
For the apostle Paul the law and the gospel are sharply 
contrasted terms, and our Lord diverges widely from 
certain Old Testament maxims and practices in applying 
his principle of fulfilment. 

What, then, is the Christian theologian to seek in the 
Old Testament? I answer that he is to seek the histori- 
cal presuppositions of Christian doctrine. Old Testament 
conceptions will always be suggestive and historically 
instructive for the study of Christian teaching, but a 
direct source of such teaching they cannot be.! Christi- 
anity rises high above that national and ritualistic religion 
on whose soil it took its rise. In a study like the present, 


1 «The real use of the record of the earliest stages of revelation is not 
to add something to the things revealed in Christ, but to give us that clear 
and all-sided insight into the meaning and practical worth of the perfect 
scheme of divine grace which can only be attained by tracing its growth.” 
— W. Robertson Smirn, The Prophets of Israel, p. 6. 


THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM 3) 


then, our inquiry is this: What presumptions concerning 
the Christian doctrine of salvation are created by the ideas 
prevailing in the Hebrew religion? Or, to take a specific 
topic: To what conceptions of atonement through Christ’s 
death would Jewish ideas of sacrifice naturally lend them- 
selves? But any result which we may attain in this field 
will be of indirect, rather than of direct, value to us. 
Suppose, for example, that it could be shown that the Jews 
had a perfectly definite theory of the import of sacrifice. 
It would not follow that the Christian doctrine of atone- 
ment could be deduced from it. We should still have to 
ask: Does the New Testament directly adopt and sanction 
this Jewish conception? Does it in no essential respect 
transcend it, and, if so, does it not in transcending it 
annul some of its elements? And we should also be war- 
ranted in asking the still more fundamental question: 
To what extent are these Jewish ideas accordant or recon- 
cilable with the essential principles of the Christian religion 
which we may derive from the life and teaching of Jesus ? 
I am well aware that all such considerations make our 
task vastly more difficult than it is popularly supposed 
to be, but nothing can be gained by evading difficulties 
which belong, in the nature of the case, to the historical 
investigation of the subject. 

There are two classes of inquiries concerning the sacri- 
fices which, for our purpose, should be broadly distin- 
guished. One relates to the origin and original import of 
Semitic sacrifice in general; the other to the religious 
meaning and value of the sacrifices for the Jews, who 
practised them under the developed Levitical system. 
Within recent years great industry and learning have 
been devoted to the first class of questions. While these 
investigations are not without their importance, it cannot 
be said that they have reached any very clear or definite 
results. Such problems are involved in the obscurity 
which always besets inquiries into the origin and motives 
of rites and customs which are not only ancient, but which 
probably arose from naive conceptions and undefined 
feelings of which we possess no clear expression. But 


4 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


even if the problems concerning the origin of Semitic 
sacrifice could be solved, we should not be greatly aided 
in determining what the sacrifices meant for the Jews in 
the Levitical period. Such practices as that of sacrifice 
undergo great modifications of meaning in the course of 
time and in the developing moral and institutional life of 
nations. 

The old dispute as to whether sacrifice was instituted 
by divine command or arose naturally out of the religious 
nature and wants of man, is an interesting one from the 
point of view of historical revelation, but our purpose 
could not be greatly furthered by any theory concerning 
it. The practical import of a religious ritual could not be 
determined by the mode in which it originated, even if 
known. It is scarcely needful to say that the latter of the 
two conceptions mentioned is so strongly favored by the 
history of religion, and by the critical investigation of 
the Old Testament books as to have become practically 
universal among modern scholars. 

In regard to the question, What was the primary motive 
which prompted the offering of sacrifices ? a considerable 
variety of opinion prevails. The theory that sacrifices 
were originally gifts to the divinity has been espoused, for 
example, by Herbert Spencer and E. B. Tylor among 
anthropologists and by Hermann Schultz and George F. 
Moore among theologians. We are reminded that in 
primitive times men thought of their gods in an anthro- 
pomorphic way and conceived of them as enjoying gifts 
of food and drink, after the manner of an earthly chieftain 
or king. In illustration of this view, reference is made to 
the offering in the Jewish system of the fruits of the soil, 
to the thank offerings and covenant sacrifices made in 
connection with festive or solemn meals, and to the fact 
that the burning flesh of the sacrificial animal is regarded 
as a sweet-smelling savor unto Yahweh. Even the 
expiatory sacrifices are held to have been primarily 
presents, whereby it was believed that the anger of the 
Deity was appeased and his favor recovered.! 


1Cf. Schultz, O. T. Theol. I. 388. 


THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM 5 


Others have found in the native tendency of man to 
worship the motive of sacrifice. In this view, the offerings 
are acts of homage to the Deity, indicative of man’s con- 
sciousness of dependence and desire for obedience. The 
sacrifices are virtually prayers and, as such, may express a 
variety of sentiments and aspirations, such as adoration, 
repentance, and supplication. This theory has been ad- 
vocated by Karl Bahr, F. D. Maurice, and R. Smend, who 
traces sacrifice in Israel through these stages : service or 
worship (2 Sam. xv. 8), eating together, communion, 
and reparation or atonement for sin. Somewhat akin to 
this view is the opinion that sacrifices were primarily com- 
mon meals, of which the divinity partook with his worship- 
pers. This conception is sometimes so carried out as to 
denote a mystic sacramental communion between the 
Deity and men. The theory is thought to be confirmed 
by the frequent association of sacrifices with sacred feasts, 
by the widespread idea of the sacredness of animals, 
and by the phenomena of totemism. It numbers among 
its advocates some of the most eminent specialists in this 
field of inquiry, among them Wellhausen, W. Robertson 
Smith, Tiele, J. G. Frazer, and F. B. Jevons. Albrecht 
Ritschl advanced a view differing from all the foregoing, 
to the effect that the sacrifice was conceived of as “ cover- 
ing” or protecting the offerer not from the holy displeas- 
ure, but from the glory of Yahweh. In this view there 
underlay the sacrifices the idea that the presence of 
Yahweh was so terrible that man must perish unless 
hidden or covered before it (ef. Gen. xxxii. 80; Judg. vi. 
22, 23; xiii. 22). Ritschl, accordingly, denied that the 
sacrifices have special reference to man’s sins; they 
relate rather to his weakness and creaturehood. Thus 
they are conceived as referring rather to the natural 
attributes of both man and God — the creaturely condition 
of man and the majesty of God—than to their moral 
nature and relations.! 

Finally, there remains the substitutionary or penal sat- 
isfaction theory of sacrifice, according to which the animal 

1See Rechtfertigung und Verséhnung, Il. 201-2038. 


6 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


is conceived of as taking the place of the sinner and suffer- 
ing death in his stead. This theory is commonly, though 
not necessarily, associated with the belief that the sacrifi- 
cial system was of direct divine appointment. This has 
long been the popular view in Protestant theology and 
has been regarded as one of the chief supports of the penal 
interpretation of the death of Christ. The argument is: 
As the sacrificial animal suffered a vicarious death for the 
sinner whom he represented, so Christ endured the penalty 
due to the sins of those whose place he assumed before the 
divine law, and, as God was pleased to accept the animal’s 
death in substitution for the death of the sinner, so he looks 
upon the death of Christ as the equivalent of the sin- 
ner’s punishment whereby the possibility of forgiveness 
is opened to him. It will be noticed that the argument 
proceeds on two assumptions, which we shall have to 
consider later, namely: (1) that the notion of a poena 
vicaria is the fundamental idea of the sacrificial system, 
and (2) that this idea and its associations, supposed to 
underlie the Jewish system of animal sacrifice, are directly 
available as categories with which to explain the occasion 
and import of the sufferings and death of Christ. The 
theory in question may be called the common, or tradi- 
tional, view of the subject, and is expounded in such 
earlier treatises on the subject as Fairbairn’s Typology and 
Kurtz’s Der alttestamentliche Opfercultus. Some recent 
writers who cannot be regarded as theologically predis- 
posed in its favor, have also given it their sanction.! Paul 


1 Principal A. M. Fairbairn expresses the opinion that the Jewish sacri- 
fices were propitiatory, but that it does not follow that the sacrifice of Christ 
had that character: ‘*In the Levitical, as in other religious systems, the 
sacrifice was offered to please God, to win his favor, to propitiate him by 
the surrender of some object precious to man. But in the Christian system 
this standpoint is transcended ; the initiative lies with God. Whatever the 
death of Christ may signify, it does not mean an expedient for quenching 
the wrath of God, or for buying off man from his vengeance. This was a 
great gain for religion.”*— The Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 
p. 500. Whether this view of Jewish sacrifice, which seems to place it on 
a level with the propitiatory offerings of heathen religions, is warranted, 
will be considered as we proceed. If correct, it is certainly a welcome 
assurance that it has been discarded by Christianity. 


THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM 7 


Volz defends it in the Zeitschrift fiir die alttestamentliche 
Wissenschaft for 1901, and H. J. Holtzmann, though hold- 
ing that the idea of substitution was originally foreign te 
the ritual, declares that in the popular thought, especially 
in the late Jewish period, “ everything pressed toward the 
assumption that the offering of a life, substituted for 
sinners according to God’s appointment, cancelled the 
death penalty which they had incurred, and that conse- 
quently the offered blood of the sacrificial victims expiated 
sin as a surrogate for the life of the guilty.”} 

Many plausible considerations are urged in favor of 
each of these theories, and yet no one of them seems 
entirely adequate. The probability is that the origin and 
motives of sacrifice are not so simple as any one theory in 
regard to them would imply. Religion is a complex 
affair, and various motives are operative in the develop- 
ment of its beliefs and practices. Moreover, these motives, 
though distinguishable, are more or less closely akin to 
each other. Let us assume for the moment the correct- 
ness of the simplest theory of sacrifice, the gift theory. 
But the idea of a present to the Deity is itself an act of 
homage or worship. The gift of what has value for the 
giver is made in recognition of the superior rights or 
claims of the divinity. And this idea of homage, in turn, 
would naturally deepen into the feeling of fellowship or 
communion. If the offered gift is regarded as sacred ; if, 
for example, the idea obtains that there is some mysterious 
connection between the life of the divinity and the life or 
blood of the animal, then the conviction will naturally 
arise that in offering the animal in sacrifice the worshipper 
enters into communion with the Power whom he would 
honor. Then, again, when the sense of sin is deepened in 
men; when the conception of the divine holiness arises 
and man appreciates the moral separation between himself 
and the Deity, it will then be natural that sacrifice should 
assume a more distinct reference to sin. It will become 
the means whereby sin is confessed and reconciliation with 
the offended divinity sought. Thus it would naturally 


x Neutest. Theol. I. 68. 


8 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


happen that gifts which in a more naive religious condi- 
tion were merely presents, should come to be regarded as 
the means of a mystic communion or even as a cover or 
protection from the displeasure felt by the Deity toward 
the sins of his worshippers. 

The phenomena of the developed sacrificial system in 
Judaism seem to sustain some such general view as this. 
Different offerings are seen to reflect differing moods and 
motives in the worshipper. In more primitive times we 
find the peace offering associated with the sacrificial feast, 
expressive of gladness and rejoicing, while the burnt offer- 
ing is associated with occasions of solemnity, awe, and fear. 
In the developed Levitical system we have, for example,1 
the sacrifices of worship, such as the burnt offering expres- 
sive of the people’s reverence for Yahweh; the thank offer- 
ings presented on special festive occasions as expressions 
of gratitude to God, and the sin and guilt offerings whose 
special object is to express the sense of sin and to obtain 
reconciliation with God. 

Now, even if it were possible by psychological analysis 
or historic research to trace these various forms of sacri- 
fice back to a common original motive, the result would 
not greatly aid us in our present purpose. The actual 
working system of sacrifice in Judaism was complex. It 
was many-sided, like the religious life out of which it 
sprang. It expressed, in its various parts, gratitude, 
rejoicing, fellowship, penitence. So far as it influenced 
primitive Christian thought and supplied the categories 
for its expression, it would naturally emphasize no one 
single element of religious experience, but rather that 
whole range of emotions and convictions of which it 
was the ceremonial expression. We shall see that this 
general view of the case is warranted by the testimony 
of the New Testament in which we find those various 
illustrative uses made of sacrificial ideas which the many- 
sided system of offerings would lead us to anticipate. _ 

One question requires a more particular consideration : 
Was the sacrificial victim’s life regarded as taking the place 


11 follow here the classification of Schultz, O. T. Theol. I. 376 sq. 


THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM 2 


of the offerer’s life? Was the animal conceived of as a 
penal substitute for the sinner? As has been already 
indicated, this view has been widely held among scholars 
and is, of course, the popular assumption regarding the 
meaning of sacrifice. Let us review the arguments which 
are advanced in its support. The main reliance for the 
theory is placed upon the description in Lev. xvi. of 
the ceremony of sending away the scapegoat into the 
wilderness on the Day of Atonement. There we read: 
‘And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of 
the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of 
the children of Israel, and all their transgressions, even 
all their sins; and he shall put them upon the head of the 
goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a man that 
is in readiness into the wilderness; and the goat shall bear 
upon him all their iniquities unto a solitary land; and he 
shall let go the goat in the wilderness” (vv. 21, 22). It 
is further stated that he who thus dismisses the goat in 
the wilderness incurs defilement and must wash his clothes 
and bathe his flesh before he returns to the camp (v. 26). 
Now, it is argued, we have here the most distinct state- 
ment that the sins of the people are put by the priest upon 
the head of this victim for Azazel and by him borne away 
into the desert. In the same connection (v. 28) we are 
told that a similar defilement was contracted by him who 
burned the flesh of the sin offerings. The inference is that 
this contamination was due to the fact that these victims 
were regarded as laden with the people’s guilt, and their 
death conceived as a substitute for the people’s penalty. 
An argument closely related to the foregoing is derived 
from the supposed import of the laying on of hands upon 
sacrificial victims. It is repeatedly enjoined in the Le- 
vitical ritual that in the making of private offerings the 
offerer shall place his hands upon the head of his obla- 
tion (Lev. iii. 2, 8, 13; ‘iv. 4), and in case of certain 
sin offerings on behalf of the whole congregation, that 
“the elders of the congregation shall lay their hands 
upon the head of the bullock before the Lord” (Lev. 
iv. 15). In other instances this ceremony is performed, 


10 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


as in the case of the scapegoat, by the priests (Lev. 
viii. 14). The theory in question regards it as self- 
evident or, at any rate, as well established, that the 
laying on of hands implies, in such cases, the substitu- 
tion of the victim for the sinner and directly denotes 
the imposition of the offerer’s sins and the transfer of 
his guilt. Thus the animal’s death would replace the 
sinner’s punishment. His sin is punished vicariously 
and its penalty is therefore remitted. 

Further, it is contended that the natural import of the 
whole ritual is substitutionary. The slaughter of a pure 
victim on whose head the owner places his hands; the 
sprinkling of the blood on the altar by the priest; the con- 
sumption of the victim’s flesh by fire —what can this 
so naturally mean — what, indeed, can it mean at all, 
except the substitution of the animal’s death for the 
offerer’s punishment, whereby he is, either symbolically 
or really, freed from the penalty of his sins? 

In this interpretation of the import of sacrifice we find 
the elements of the penal substitution theory of the death 
of Christ. One has but to transfer this explanation, 
mutatis mutandis, to the problem of the saving value of 
Christ’s sufferings and death and carry out its logical 
implications, in order to construct the theory in detail. 
From this Old Testament source that theory always de- 
rived plausible support, especially in the popular mind. 
The categories of the theory in question naturally lend 
themselves to the development of a theory of salvation by 
substitute through a system of equivalences and imputa- 
tions. The explanation is clear, striking, and realistic. 
There is nothing vague, nothing mysterious about it. As 
the sacrificial animal died in place of the sinner, so Christ’s 
death was the penal equivalent and substitute of the 
eternal death which our sins deserved, and having been 
thus endured by him vicariously, need not be again en- 
dured by us; whence arises the possibility of our for- 
giveness. I am only concerned here to point out three 
things: So far as this argument derives confirmation from 
the sacrificial ritual, it assumes (1) the indisputable cor- 


THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM id 


rectness of the substitutionary interpretation ; (2) the 
appropriation by Christ himself and the apostolic Church 
of this conception and its corollaries in their application to 
his death; and (3) the entire legitimacy of transferring 
over the ideas underlying a system of animal sacrifice to 
the interpretation of Christ’s saving work. These points 
we must carefully keep in mind as we proceed. 

With regard to the first point it must be noted that a 
decided and increasing majority of specialists in the study 
of the subject would greatly modify or entirely deny the 
theory of the substitutionary import of Jewish sacrifice. 
Some of the difficulties which it encounters are as follows: 
(1) The ceremonies connected with the sending of the 
scapegoat into the wilderness prove nothing concerning 
the import of sacrifice. The flesh of this goat was not 
burned; atonement was not made by its blood; it was not 
a sacrifice at all. The origin and meaning of the goat 
“for Azazel” are indeed obscure. Azazel, who is not 
mentioned elsewhere in the Old Testament,! appears to 
have been conceived as a demon-prince who inhabited the 
desert, and the ceremony of delivering over to him the 
goat, laden with the sins of the people, was probably a 
realistic way of representing their sins as now borne away 
to the evil spirit to whom they belonged. The Levitical 
ritual thus preserves, probably, an earlier, popular be- 
lief to which there are many analogies among primitive 
peoples. ‘The carrying away of the people’s guilt to an 
isolated and desert region has its nearest analogies, not in 
ordinary atoning sacrifices, but in those physical methods 
of getting rid of an infectious taboo which characterize 
the lowest forms of superstition. The same form of dis- 
infection recurs in the Levitical legislation, where a live 
bird is made to fly away with the contagion of leprosy 
(Gey. xiv. 7, 53).” 

We turn, next, to the rite of the laying on of hands. 
Outside the sacrificial ritual we meet with several uses of 


1 He appears in The Book of Enoch, ch. x., as the leader of the evil 
angels who formed unions with the daughters of men (cf. Gen. vi. 2-4). 
2 W. R. Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 422. 


12 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


this ceremony. It is a symbol of blessing when Jacob 
places his hands upon the heads of his sons (Gen. xlviii. 
14). The witnesses laid their hands upon those whom 
they had heard to blaspheme, apparently in solemn attes- 
tation of their testimony (Ley. xxiv. 14). The Levites 
were set apart to priestly functions by the imposition of 
hands (Num. viii. 10), and by the same rite Moses set 
apart Joshua as his successor (Num. xxvii. 18, 23; Deut. 
xxxiv. 9). Now the general idea underlying this cere- 
mony can hardly be doubtful; it is that of benediction or 
dedication. What the precise idea is in case of the wit- 
nesses is not quite clear. The act may denote the devo- 
tion of the accused to the death penalty, or serve to 
identify the witnesses as those who are responsible for the 
accusation. But what is of principal importance to be 
noted is that, so far as the act symbolizes impartation, it 
is the impartation of good; no instances are found in 
which any evil, such as guilt or a curse, is conceived to be 
transferred to any person by the laying on of hands. The 
presumption, therefore, is that such is not the case in the 
sacrificial ritual. But there is no intimation in connec- 
tion with any sacrifice that the offerer’s guilt is regarded 
as transferred to the animal. Were that the case it would 
seem that the victim’s flesh would be unclean; on the con- 
trary, it is “most holy” (Lev. x. 17) and is eaten by the 
priest. The probability, therefore, is that the laying on 
of hands does not denote, in the case of the sacrifices, the 
transfer of guilt, but some other idea, such as the devotion 
of the victim to God or the worshipper’s acknowledgment 
of it as his own. 

The substitutionary theory encounters a further difficulty 
in the fact that offerings were not accepted in atonement 


1“*TIn ordinary burnt-offerings and sin-offerings the imposition of 
hands is not officially interpreted by the Law as a transference of sin to 
the victim, but rather has the same sense as in acts of blessing or conse- 
cration (Gen. xlviii. 14; Num. viii. 10; Deut. xxxiv. 9), where the idea, 
no doubt, is that the physical contact between the parties serves to 
identify them, but not specially to transfer guilt from the one to the 
other.’? W. R. Smith, op. cit., p. 423. Similarly, Schultz says that ‘* by 
the laying on of the hand sin is not transferred to the victim,’’ but by 


THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM 13 


for sins meriting death (Num. xv. 80), whereas this 
would be most natural if the system contemplated the 
substitution of the victim’s death for that of the offerer. 
In this case also it would seem necessary that the animal 
should be slain by the priest or God’s representative and 
not, as he was, by the owner. Moreover, we find that 
all the offerings atone — the gift of fine flour (the offering 
of the poor), as well as the animal sacrifice (Lev. v. 11-13). 
How could such be the case if the notion of a death 
substituted were the underlying idea of the sin offering ? 
It may be pointed out, further, that the penal interpreta- 
tion of the laying on of hands finds no parallel in the case 
of Christ since no hands were laid on him. 

Why, then, we are led to ask, has the theory of penal 
substitution been so widely accepted? Why has it been 
so generally regarded as embodying the natural and obvi- 
ous meaning of the sin offerings? We must answer that 
this conception furnishes a groove into which religious 
reflection may easily slip and thereafter run smoothly with 
no sense of the vagueness and perplexity which attach to 
more subjective and mystical interpretations. The later 
Judaism furnishes us the classical example of the applica- 
tion to sacrifice of those physical and mechanical catego- 
ries with which was built up the Pharisaic system of 
satisfactions, imputations, and merit-treasuries. It is an 
illustration of the externalizing of religious conceptions 
and of their translation into terms of mathematical equiv- 
alence and pecuniary debit and credit. To this process 
of externalizing the whole Jewish system of sacrifice was 
subjected by talmudic reflection. To assign precise dates 
to the beginning or completion of this process of thought 


this act ‘‘the sacrificer dedicates each victim, as his own property, to 
some higher object.’? — O. T. Theol. I. 391. Dillmann writes: ‘‘ Die Hand- 
auflegung kommt bei allen Opfern vor und will nicht die Siinden tiber- 
tragen auf das Tier (wie Lev. xvi. 21 beim Asaselbock), sondern nur 
die Intention des Opfernden, hier das Siihneverlangen, mitgeben.’’ 
Alitest. Theol., p. 468. ‘‘ The theory that the victim’s life is put in the 
place of the owner’s is nowhere hinted at.’’ G. F. Moore, Art. Sacri- 
Jice in Encycl. Bibl. Cf. J. C. Matthes, Zeitschr. fiir d. alttest. Wis- 
sensch., 1903, 


14 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


is, of course, impossible. Some think that it had attained 
a considerable development while the temple was still stand- 
ing and that traces of it are even visible in the Priestly 
Code,! while others hold that, so far as the Old Testament 
is concerned, the idea of a poena vicaria is a pure importa- 
tion.2. But, whenever the penal substitution theory arose, 
it is quite certain that it was foreign to the original mean- 
ing of the sacrifices. It isa late theory of their signifi- 
cance, the product of Pharisaic scholasticism, and is without 
attestation in the Old Testament itself. The utmost that 
can be granted to the theory in question would be to ad- 
mit the opinion of Holtzmann that, while the penal in- 
terpretation of sacrifice is historically unwarranted, it was, 
nevertheless, popularly entertained within the Old Testa- 
ment period,’ or the judgment of Dillmann that the ritual 
did contemplate a substitution, not indeed a substitution 
in kind, but the gracious substitution for the penalty of 
something (the Kopher, AvJzTpov, blood of the offering) 
which was not itself penal or sin-bearing.t We must con- 
clude, therefore, that whatever may have been the popular 
interpretation of Jewish sacrifice, neither its original nor 
its intended and prevailing meaning was penal or substi- 
tutionary. 

What, then, did it mean? What was the object of the 
sin offerings if not penal satisfaction? It must be ad- 
mitted that no answer has ever been given which is so 


1 So Holtzmann, Neutest. Theol. I. 66. 

2So G. F. Moore, Art. Sacrifice in Encycl. Bibl.; of. Smend, 
Alttest. Religionsgeschichte, p. 128: ‘* Es ist zweifelhaft ob die Israeliten 
stellvertretende Hinrichtung kannten.’’ Professor A. B. Davidson writes: 
“The traditional explanation (that the life given atones for sin) has 
been that the death of the victim was a poena vicaria for the sin of 
the offerer. And it is probable that this idea did become attached to 
sacrifice. It is questionable, however, when other things are considered, 
if it be found in the law.’? After summarizing the reasons to the con- 
trary, which are, briefly : (1) that sacrifices were gifts, (2) that they were 
offered for sins of inadvertency, and (3) that they were offered mainly 
for a people already in covenant fellowship with God, Dr. Davidson con- 
cludes: ‘‘It does not appear probable that the death of the victim was 
regarded by the law as a penalty, death being the highest possible pen- 
alty.’”’ Theol. of O. T., p. 358, 

3 Qp. cit. I. 68, 4 Op. cit., pp, 468, 469, 


THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM 15 


simple and clear as that of the popular, late Jewish theory. 
But the simplicity of an explanation does not necessarily 
commend it. That quality may be due to the superficial- 
ity or coarseness of the theory. The difficulty of propos- 
ing a perfectly definite answer to the question arises from 
the uncertainty as to what was the primary and dominant 
motive of sacrifice, and from the evident complexity of the 
ideas associated with it. We can here hardly do more 
than indicate certain conclusions which modern research 
seems to warrant: (1) The original and prevailing idea 
of sacrifice was probably that of a gift—a gift for the 
divinity to eat or drink or smell, or a gift to be eaten by 
him and his worshippers in common. With the develop- 
ment of the religious consciousness this gift-idea would 
naturally expand into the expression of such sentiments as 
gratitude, homage, and fellowship.1_ (2) A series of mys- 
tical ideas attached themselves to the blood. This element 
was conceived to be the seat of life and, as such, was sacred 
and possessed of a mystical power. From this idea would 
easily arise the conviction that God has given to man this 
sacred gift as the means whereby he should approach him 
in worship and penitence, and which God should accept as 
a covering for his sins. (8) It is probable that the idea 
of the solidarity of the tribe or race, which was so strong 
in Semitic antiquity, had its part in the development of 
the sacrificial system. The sins of parents were regarded 
as entailed upon children. Yahweh’s suffering Servant 
might make reparation for the sins of his fellows. On 
the analogy of these ideas the sacred animal might be con- 
ceived as representing the life of the community, which is 
given up to God in consecration or (as in the later and 
popular conception) in penal suffering. (4) In the Levit- 
ical Code the sacrificial system has a special connection 
with the confession and forgiveness of sin. There can be 


1‘¢Freude war der Grundzug des althebriischen Cultus,’? Smend, 
op. cit., p. 125. 

2 For an elaborate description of the mystic meanings and uses of 
blood in Semitic antiquity, see Dr. H. C. Trumbull’s books, The Blood 
Covenant and The Threshold Covenant, 


16 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


no doubt that certain offerings were particularly designed 
to emphasize the reality and guilt of sin and to keep alive 
in the people the sense of God’s displeasure toward it. 
If these offerings did not appease God by affording penal 
satisfaction, they did express contrition and were regarded 
as the divinely appointed means whereby sin’s heinousness 
should be confessed and attested. (5) It is clear, however, 
that the Levitical Code assumes that God is not hostile to 
man or indisposed to forgive, but that, of his own accord, 
he approaches the sinner in mercy, and himself provides 
the ways and means of reconciliation. Here is the radical 
difference between the heathen and the biblical conceptions 
of sacrifice. Whatever the sacrifices may have been 
conceived to accomplish, and in whatever way they may have 
been regarded as operating, it is evident that they assume 
the antecedent graciousness of God, who, though preserib- 
ing conditions, offers a free forgiveness. (6) The substitu- 
tion which was involved in the sacrifices was of the nature 
of a scenic or symbolic representation rather than of a 
strict literal or penal character. It is the gracious substi- 
tution of one way of accepting the sinner for another. In 
place of his actual obedience (that is, despite his sin) God 
accepts him in his offering which expresses his intention 
of obedience and his yearning for salvation. It thus 
appears that the Priestly Code, though having many out- 
ward features in common with heathen sacrificial systems 
and differing in its emphasis widely from the prophetic 
teaching, is not wanting in ethical elements. Its outward 
ritual, though exposed to great misconception and misuse, 
is the pictorial expression of truths concerning God and 
man and sin, which are fundamental to the Christian doc- 
trine of salvation. How this ritual stood related to the 
doctrine of the prophets and how far it supplied materials 
for early Christian teaching we have next to consider.! 

1 For detailed information concerning the sacrifices I would refer 
the reader to the very thorough article Sacrifice by Professor W. P. 
Paterson in Hastings’s Dictionary of the Bible, to which I acknowledge 
my indebtedness. The development of the sacrificial system in Israel is 


traced in a clear and masterly manner by Professor Smend in his Alttest. 
Religionsgeschichte, § 9. 


™ 


CHAPTER II 
THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION 


In passing from the Levitical ritual to the teaching of 
the prophets we enter anew world. The former gives the 
impression that the cultus is the chief vehicle of God’s 
grace to man, especially that forgiveness is mediated 
solely through sacrifice. The writer of Hebrews did 
not overstate the case in saying that “under the law 
almost everything was purified with blood; and unless 
blood was shed, no forgiveness was to be obtained.” ? 
The prophets recognize no such necessity. They never 
imply, or even admit, that the divine favor or forgive- 
ness is inseparably linked with sacrifice or any other 
ceremony. ‘Ritual has no place in the prophetic teach- 
ing; that which is moral alone has any meaning.” 2 

Indeed, we meet in the prophets with sharp criticism of 
the sacrifices as practised at the time. Speaking on be- 
half of Yahweh, Hosea exclaims, “I desire mercy, and 
not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than 
burnt offerings” (Hos. vi. 6). Amos is more vehe- 
ment: “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take 
no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though 
ye offer me your burnt offerings and meal offerings, I 
will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace 
offerings of your fat beasts” (Amos v. 21, 22). The 
word of Yahweh by Isaiah is to the same effect: “To 
what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto 
me? I delight not in the blood of bullocks, and of 
lambs, and of he-goats” (Is. i. 11); and echoes of these 
thoughts are found in other prophets and in poets who 


1 Heb. ix. 22. Twentieth Century New Testament. 
2 A. B. Davidson, Art. Prophecy in Hastings’s D. B. 
17 


18 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


share the prophetic spirit.1 What, then, was the pro- 
phetie estimate of sacrifice? It would be an exaggera- 
tion to say that the prophets condemned the institution 
of sacrifice in general. In many expressions they 
assumed its legitimacy. The question is commonly 
answered by saying that they regarded sacrifice, if un- 
accompanied by a righteous life, as an abomination to 
Yahweh. Dr. Davidson calls in question the correct- 
ness of this answer and defines their position thus: that 
sacrifice as a substitute for a righteous life is an abomina- 
tion.2, This may be the more accurate statement, but it 
is difficult to see how the practice of sacrifice apart from 
righteousness could fail to result in the substitution of 
sacrifice for righteousness. When the ritual is formal 
and unreal, it inevitably usurps the place of reality in 
worship. But in any case two points cannot be doubt- 
ful: (1) that the prophets inveighed against the exag- 
gerated importance of ritual, declaring that sacrifice, 
for example, was of small value in comparison with 
sincerity, uprightness, and obedience, and from this 
position it must follow, (2) that they could not have 
regarded the sacrifices as essential accompaniments of 
repentance or necessary media of forgiveness. They 
place no emphasis upon them. To the question, What 
does Yahweh require of man? they answer in the spirit 
of Micah’s reply, “To do justly, to love merey, and to 
walk humbly with God” (Mi. vi. 8). In the view of 
many, the prophets did not regard sacrifice as one of the 
primitive, divinely established institutions of Israel. 
There are passages (Jer. vii. 22; Amos v. 25) which 
seem to declare that “in the wilderness God prescribed 
no ritual to Israel.” But if these passages do not in- 
tend to make so sweeping an assertion, they cannot mean 
less than to affirm the relative unimportance of sacrificial 
rites. 

We shall best approach the prophetic doctrine by rais- 

1 #.g. 1 Sam. xv. 22; Jer. vii. 22, 23; Mi. vi. 6-8; Ps. xl. 6; li. 16. 


2D. B. IV. 119. 
8G. A. Smith, The Book of the Twelve Prophets, I. 171. 


THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION 19 


ing the question as to the nature of salvation. Salvation' 


from what? We must remember that in the Old Testa- 
ment the idea of salvation was the subject of a long 
development, and is therefore many-sided. The typical 
case of salvation in early Israel was the deliverance of the 
nation from bondage in Egypt. Echoes of this idea of 
salvation are heard throughout their whole history. Sal- 
vation is deliverance from perils, victory over enemies, the 
achievement of security and prosperity.1 This conception 
of salvation has two characteristic notes; the deliverance 
is primarily (1) external and (2) national. Let us now 
observe the influence of the prophetic spirit upon this idea. 

The material and national aspects of salvation are still 
prominent in the prophets. When the figure of Messiah 
emerges into view, he wears the appearance of a national 
Deliverer. He is a kind of second David, a King who 
shall reign and prosper and execute justice in the earth, 
in whose days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall 
dwell safely (Jer. xxiii. 5,6). Another prophet had de- 
scribed the glorious coming age as a time of deliverance 
from enemies, a period of happiness and prosperity under 
a wise and just government (Amos ix. 11-15). Especially 
did the experiences of the exile sharpen this conception 
and quicken the hope of national salvation. This hope 
finds classic expression in Jeremiah, “ Fear not thou, O 
Jacob my servant, neither be dismayed, O Israel: for lo! 
I will save thee from afar, and thy seed from the land of 
their captivity; and Jacob shall return and be quiet and 
at ease, and none shall make him afraid” (Jer. xlvi. 27). 
In like manner Ezekiel depicts the salvation of the scattered 
flock of Israel when Yahweh shall set up one shepherd 


over them who shall feed them, even his servant David | 


(Ezek. xxxiv. 22, 23), and Zechariah’s message takes a 


similar form, “Thus saith the Lord of hosts: Behold, I | 


will save my people from the east country and the west 
country: and I will bring them, and they shall dwell in 


the midst of Jerusalem; and they shall be my people, and | 


I will be their God, in truth and in righteousness ” (Zech. 
1 Cf. Deut. xx. 24; 1 Sam. iv. 3; x. 19; Ps. evi. 4, 5. 


20 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


viii. 7, 8). The blessedness of this happy time when 
Yahweh shall accomplish the salvation of the nation was 
one of the favorite themes of poets. Viewed in anticipa- 
tion it inspired the prayer: “Save us, O Lord our God, 
and gather us from among the nations” (Ps. evi. 47) ; 
viewed from the standpoint of its accomplishment, it 
prompted the song, “ Behold, God is my salvation; I 
will trust and not be afraid: for the Lord Jehovah is 
my strength and song; and he is become my salvation” 
CIs. xii. 2). 

But it will be readily seen that this national salvation 
is not a mere political deliverance. Not in freedom and 
prosperity alone shall the people dwell, but in truth and 
righteousness. Ethical and spiritual conditions are prom- 
inent characteristics of the Messianic era. The coming 
King shall be a just judge, as well as a tender shepherd ” 
Cs. xi. 4). He shall right the wrongs of earth not only 
by binding up the brokenhearted and proclaiming liberty 
to the captives, but by announcing the day of vengeance 
of our God (Is. lxi. 1,2). But perhaps the most striking 
expression of the moral character of the promised salva- 
tion is found in Jeremiah’s oracle of the New Covenant 
where we are told that the law of that happy era is to be 
the inner law of free obedience: “I will put my law in 
their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it; and 
I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer. 
xxxi. 33). It is clear that notwithstanding the promi- 
nence given to external features, such as outward pros- 
perity and peace, the salvation of the nation and real moral 
righteousness go hand in hand.} 

What, now, was the nature of that righteousness which 
accompanied salvation and gave to it its deeper meaning ? 
Formally considered, righteousness in the Old Testament 
is a forensic conception. To be righteous is to be “in the 
right,” as in a controversy or a suit at law.? But this 


1See Professor William Adams Brown’s article Salvation in Hast- 
ings’s D. B. To this admirable article I am much indebted. 

2 See W. R. Smith, The Prophets of Israel, pp. 71, 72, and J. Skinner, 
Art. Righteousness in O. T. in Hastings’s D. B. 


THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION oe 


definition does not greatly aid us in determining the 
actual content of the term. ‘To say that righteousness in 
men is accord with the will of God who is always “in the 
right,” does not help us to any real explanation. We 
need to know something of the contents of Yahweh’s 
sovereign will, and something of its relation to his moral 
character before righteousness will mean anything tangi- 
ble. With what moral ideas, we ask, did the prophets 
clothe this conception of Yahweh’s rightness, and what 
do these ideas involve for human conduct and character ? 
We must answer, first of all, that they conceived the will 
of God as stable and consistent, incapable of being moved 
from the strict line of rectitude by fickle passions on his 
own part or by appeals or entreaties on the part of his 
worshippers. In other words, they based the purposes of 
God in his ethical nature, and conceived of his righteous- 
ness as the perfect harmony of his will with that nature. 
In this way the term “righteousness” as applied to God 
acquired a distinctly moral character. Righteousness in 
men is conformity to the will of God, or, what is the same 
thing, likeness to him in character. 

But the thoughts of the prophets are never presented in 
abstract form. What concrete acts and qualities consti- 
tuted for them true righteousness? We shall see that 
they were such as could not be determined by legal rules or 
traditional customs. The prophets appealed to the moral 
sense, and measured matters of right and wrong by tests 
which were purely ethical. God’s righteousness is seen, 
for example, in his absolutely equitable dealings with men, 
and the righteousness of the nation consists, in part, in 
a correspondingly correct administration of justice. <A 
righteous government will “relieve the oppressed, judge 
the fatherless, plead for the widow” (Is. i. 17). Simi- 
larly, God’s righteousness is seen not only in executing 
judgment upon sin, but in saving his people and in blessing 
the penitent. He is “a just God and a Saviour” (ls. 
xly. 21). In like manner righteousness in men will 
require not only that they shall “do justice,” but that 
they shall “love mercy” (Mi. vi. 8). “The Old Testa- 


22 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

ment writers know nothing of the sharp contrast often 
drawn by theologians between the righteousness and the 
mercy of God.”! ‘To the same effect Dr. Davidson writes: 
“God is righteous in forgiving the penitent : ‘ Deliver me 
from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation ; 
and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness’ (Ps. 
li. 14). There is no antithesis between righteousness and 
grace. The exercise of grace, goodness, forgiveness, may 
be called righteousness in God. Thus : ‘ Answer me in thy 
faithfulness and in thy righteousness, and enter not into 
judgment with thy servant; for in thy sight shall no 
man living be found righteous’ (Ps. exliii. 1). Here right- 
eousness is opposed to entering into judgment, z.e. to the 
very thing which technically and dogmatically is called 
righteousness.”.? Without pursuing the subject further it 
is evident that the prophetic conception of that righteous- 
ness in which and to which the nation is to be saved has 
a strongly ethical cast. It stands in contrast to all such 
sins as partiality, cruelty, and oppression. It is a broad 
conception. It is, at once, uprightness and equitable- 
ness ; hostility to the wrongs and defence of the rights of 
man; it is, in a word, a due regard for all the interests 
of mankind, a moral kinship to him who exercises and 
delights in lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness 
in the earth (Jer. ix. 24). While, therefore, we must 
recognize the external and political features of the con- 
ception of salvation even in the prophets, we must also 
recognize the deepening and ethicizing which the concep- 
tion experienced at their hands. 

In the classic period of prophecy the conception of 
Israel’s salvation was dominated by the Messianic idea in 
its various forms. The conception varied in breadth and 
spirituality according as the coming One was conceived as 
an ideal King, or a moral Hero, or was foreshadowed as a 
suffering Servant of God. But in their highest flights of 
inspiration the great prophets catch glimpses not only 
of a universal peace, but of a world-wide worship and ser- 


1 Skinner, D. B. IV. 280. 
2 The Theology of the Old Testament, p. 184. 


THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION 23 


vice of Yahweh. ‘“ The wilderness and the solitary place 
shall be glad, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as 
the rose” (Is. xxxv. 1). The voice of weeping shall no 
more be heard, and darkness and gloom shall be banished 
from the world (Is. Ixv. 19; Ix. 19, 20). The knowl- 
edge of Yahweh shall no more be confined to Israel, but 
shall fill the earth (Jer. xxxi. 34; Hab. ii. 14). Egypt and 
Assyria shall be worshippers with Israel of the one true 
God (Is. xix. 24, 25). God shall make the faithful 
remnant not only a means of restoring the nation but also 
a light to the Gentiles, the medium of his salvation to 
the ends of the earth (Is. xlix. 6). 

Here the prophetic idea of the purpose of Israel’s elec- 
tion comes clearly into view. Why, of all the families of 
the earth, had Yahweh known only Israel? (Amos iii. 2.) 
Hosea answers that the choice was an act of love (Hos. x1. 
1). Lovetowhom? Was it love to Israel alone? Is the 
love of Yahweh narrow and partial? Is he a respecter of 
persons? The prophets’ answer to this question is founded 
on their conception of Yahweh’s universalsway. The God 
of the whole earth cannot love Israel alone, and cannot 
have chosen him for his own sake alone. If Israel is 
chosen to privilege, he is chosen, much more, to service. 
If he is chosen to be the favorite of heaven, he is made 
such only that he may be the dispenser of blessing to 
mankind. His election does not mean a monopoly 
of the divine favor; it means rather appointment to a 
world-historical mission. God has set his love upon 
the nation in order that he might make it the vehicle of 
conveying the knowledge of his saving grace to mankind. 
“Israel is elect for the sake of the non-elect.” 4 

This enlargement and deepening of the conception of 
salvation, on the one hand, and the nation’s experience of 
misfortune, disappointment, and suffering on the other, 
doubtless account for the tendency to remand the realiza- 
tion of the Messianic blessedness to a new world-age with 
changed conditions. The conception of a new heaven 
and a new earth (Is. Ixv. 17; lIxvi. 22), a renovated 

1 Cf. Bruce, Apologetics, Bk. II. ch. iii. 


24 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


nature in the era of redemption, can hardly have been 
purely figurative for the prophet’s mind. It reappears 
in a highly realistic form in Paul’s picture of the Messi- 
anic time (Rom. viii. 21,22). As this distinction between 
the present and the coming age was sharpened, it became 
the basis of the wide separation which was made in the 
apocalyptic books and in the popular thought of later Ju- 
daism, between the present period of suffering and expect- 
ancy and the glorious coming era of victory and peace 
which the Messiah shall inaugurate. In early Christian 
thought, in turn, this same sharp contrast was applied to 
the distinction between “ this present evil age” (Gal. i. 4) 
and the happy time which shall follow Christ’s parousia. 
Echoes of this late prophetic conception of the Messianic 
era as radically different from the present, are heard in the 
eschatological passages of the New Testament, such as the 
Pauline apocalypse (2 Thess. ii. 1-12), and in the popu- 
lar language of religion which still refers salvation to a 
future world. 

Let us turn now from these more general considerations 
to those elements of prophetic teaching which are more 
closely akin to Christian doctrine. One of these is the 
conception of individual salvation. The frustration of the 
national hopes consequent upon the exile tended to draw 
attention away from the people as a whole and to awaken 
interest in the individual. This growing individualism 
was accompanied by a stronger sense of personal responsi- 
bility. Under its influence men shall not say: “The 
fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth 
are set on edge. But every man shall die for his own in- 
iquity; every man that eateth the sour grapes, his teeth 
shall be set on edge” (Jer. xxxi. 29, 30). This same 
proverb is cited and refuted by Ezekiel (xviii. 2) to whom 
Yahweh’s word came saying, “ Behold, all souls are mine ; 
as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is 
mine; the soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezek. xviii. 4). 
This whole chapter is devoted to disproving the idea of 
hereditary sin and to enforcing the truth of individual re- 
sponsibility to God. ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity 


THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION 25 


of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity 
of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be 
upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be 
upon him” (Ezek. xviii. 20). 

One of the most important religious consequences of 
this increased sense of the responsibility and worth of the 
individual was the strengthening of the idea of personal 
immortality. The Old Testament, taken as a whole, illus- 
trates a surprising indifference to the question of a life 
beyond the grave. Except by somewhat precarious in- 
ferences from the stories of Enoch and Elijah, we obtain 
no intimation of personal immortality in the historical 
books. All interest centres on the prosperity and per- 
petuity of the tribe or the nation. The same silence per- 
vades the writings of the prophets. We meet with the 
most fervid descriptions of God’s faithfulness to his people 
and with the most glowing pictures of the nation’s future ; 
but of personal immortality beyond death there is not one 
clear word.! In the Psalms and Wisdom books the out- 
look into the future, for the individual, is little, if any, 
clearer. Nowand again the poets of Israel strike a strain 
of hope and sing of God’s power over death and Sheol,? but 
the triumphant strain is soon lost in uncertainty and sad- 
ness.2 The faith expressed in passages like Ps. xvi. 10 and 
xvii. 15 is not sustained. The glimpse which Job has of 
his vindication in another life (Job xix. 25-27) is mo- 
mentary, and he quickly turns back to seek a solution of 

1 The resurrection and bestowment of life described in Hosea (vi. 1-3 ; 
xiii. 14) and Ezekiel (ch. xxxvii) quite obviously refer to the recovery of 
the nation from disaster. Two passages in Isaiah appear to refer to a 
future life: ‘‘ He hath swallowed up death forever’? (xxv. 8), and ‘‘ Thy 
dead shall live ; my dead bodies (i.e. the departed members of the nation) 
shall arise’? (xxvi. 19). But the critical difficulties surrounding these 
passages are great. The whole section, chs. xxiv—xxvii, is very late. 
Duhm regards the first passage cited as a ‘‘ Randbemerkung eines Les- 
ers’? (Comm. in loco). But, in any case, it is questionable whether 
it carries us beyond the idea of exemption from death in the Messianic 
age ; while the second passage is still dominated by the idea of national 
salvation. The prediction (or wish) seems to mean that the members of 
the nation who shall have died before the consummation shall be recoy- 


ered from Sheol to participate in the promised blessedness. 
2 Fig. Ps. xlix. 15 ; bxxiii. 23-26. 3)See Ps. vi. 5; exv. 17- 


26 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


his problem here in this world. It is only in the late 
Book of Daniel that we meet the culmination of the devel- 
oping individualism which we have been tracing. Here, 
at last, we find the explicit assertion of that conviction 
which the truths of God’s boundless sway and infinite love 
seem to us so obviously to require —the conviction of a 
resurrection to a life of rewards and punishments in the 
coming age (Dan. xii. 2, 3). 

Howis this eclipse of the belief in personal immortality 
to be explained? And what is the secret of its final 
emergence? While neither question can be adequately 
answered in a single word, I cannot doubt that the over- 
shadowing importance which was attached to the national 
life and the national salvation tended powerfully to retard 
the development of this belief. And when, at length, 
largely through the work of the prophets, the religious 
value of the individual came to be better appreciated, the 
way was opened to the logical conclusion of Israel’s faith ; 
namely, the conviction of a personal life beyond death. 
Whatever, then, be the precise history of the idea of 
immortality in Israel, whatever be the exact force of the 
rather obscure references to the subject, one point is clear ; 
namely, that the belief in a future life was a logical out- 
come of the Jewish religion; it was a natural and war- 
ranted, even if slowly developed, conclusion from Israel’s 
faith in God and estimate of man. In this development 
we note two significant approximations to Christian con- 
ceptions : (1) salvation is not national or corporate only, 

/~but individual; and (2) salvation has reference not only 
to this life, but to that which is to come. 

We must now consider two questions which have been 
already suggested: How far was salvation regarded as 
salvation from sin? and, How was recovery from sin to 
be accomplished ? The changes which we have sketched 
—the weakening of the national idea, the disappointment 
and suffering of the people in exile, and the increased 
importance which was attached to the relation of the 
individual to God — would all tend to deepen the sense of 
personal sinfulness and to correlate the idea of salvation 


THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION 27 


with that sinfulness. Naturally enough, it is in the 
Jewish Hymn-book where this conception of salvation 
comes to its most intense expression.! But it is prominent 
also in the prophets, especially in the “ prophets of indi- 
vidualism” (W. A. Brown), Jeremiahand Ezekiel. A 
prominent feature of the New Covenant will be that each 
man will directly and personally know Yahweh, and he 
will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no 
more (Jer. xxxi. 84). The promise of individual forgive- 
ness is coupled with the promise of national restoration, 
“T will cleanse them from all their iniquity, whereby they 
have sinned against me; and I will pardon all their 
iniquities, whereby they have sinned against me, and 
whereby they have transgressed against me” (Jer. xxxiii. 
8). The thought of personal salvation from sin is promi- 
nent in Ezekiel. Salvation is cleansing, the bestowal of a 
new heart, the gift of a new spirit (Ezek. xxxvi. 25-27; 
xxxvil. 23). Scarcely less pervading is the thought of 
salvation from sin in Deutero-Isaiah. Yahweh is the 
Saviour of his people; he delights in forgiveness, “I, 
even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for 
mine own sake; and I will not remember thy sins” (Is. 
xii. 25. Cf. xliv. 22; Zech. xiii. 1). Here we have a 
distinct approximation to the Christian doctrine which 
always conceives of salvation as being, primarily, salvation 
from sin and its consequences. 

Much more difficult, however, is our second inquiry : 
How is salvation accomplished? On what grounds and 
conditions is it realized? In an effort to answer we shall 
have to consider the place in the prophetic conceptions of 
four elements: (1) the divine grace; (2) repentance; 
(3) inward renewal; and (4) vicarious suffering. 

The grace of God is the ground of salvation. It is 
according to God’s nature to show mercy to mankind. 
The prophets express this idea by saying that God saves 
men “for his own sake” (Is. xliii. 25), or “for his 
name’s sake” (Jer. xiv. 7; Ps. evi. 8), that is, by reason 
of what he is, because it is his nature so to do. 

1 See, e.g. Ps, xxxix, 8; li, 10-12; Ixxix.9; cxxx. 7, 8. 


28 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


The “name” in the Hebrew mode of thought is the 
symbol of the meaning or essence of that for which it 
stands. Accordingly we read that it was for his name’s 
sake that he delivered Israel from Egypt (Ezek. xx. 9). 

The description of the religion of Israel as a legal sys- 
tem is apt to imply some exaggeration of this element in 
its character. As the spirit of prophecy died out in the 
centuries immediately preceding the advent of Christ, 
legalism and ritualism more and more prevailed and 
became the dominant characteristics of religion. These 
tendencies came to their full fruitage in Pharisaism. The 
current popular theories of this later time which con- — 
ceived religion to consist in tithings, fastings, and the like 
are frequently reflected in the pages of the New Testa- 
ment. This was the legalism which Jesus denounced and 
against which Paul inveighed. 

But it would be quite erroneous to impute the character 
of this legalism, without qualification, to the Old Tes- 
tament religion as such. Even the law, including the 
sacrificial system, was based on the principle of grace. 
The contention of the apostle Paul that, as between grace 
and law, the former was primary and fundamental (Gal. 
iii. 17, 18), is amply justified by the Old Testament in all 
its parts. It is out of his mercy that God gives the law 
and prescribes and accepts the sacrifices. The whole 
system assumes that God is inherently merciful. That 
he was propitiated by the sacrifices or by any other means, 
in the sense of being rendered merciful or of being thereby 
made willing to forgive, is a conception which is not only 
unwarranted by any Old Testament statement, but fun- 
damentally opposed to all the presuppositions of Israel’s 
religion. The absence of any such conception of propitia- 
tion is one of the marks which distinguishes Judaism from 
heathenism. 

Nor was this mercifulness or undeserved favor of God 
conceived by the prophets as a rival or antithetic principle 
to his rectitude or severity toward sin. On the contrary, 
they are often associated in such a way as to suggest that 
they are regarded as two aspects of the same character. 


THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION 29 


Amos deduces the penal severity of God from his love, 
“ You (Israel) only have I known of all the families of the 
earth: therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities” 
(Amos iii. 2). For Hosea the motives of God’s choice of 
Israel are righteousness, judgment, lovingkindness, and 
merey (Hos. ii. 19), as if they belonged inseparably 
together. To Joel the God whose anger flames out 
against sin is, at the same time, “gracious and full of 
compassion, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy ” (Joel 
ii. 13). In wrath he remembers mercy (Hab. iii. 2). The 
conception that retributive justice is the fundamental, 
essential quality of God, and that mercy is a secondary 
and optional attribute whose operation has to be secured 
or provided for by means of some “plan” or “scheme,” 
is not only without warrant in the Old Testament, but is 
entirely irreconcilable with the Hebrew idea of God in the 
classic period of Israel’s religion. It is more accordant 
with the conceptions of late Jewish theology as illus- 
trated in popular Pharisaism. 

The only conditions of salvation which the prophets 
preseribe are such as are expressed in the words “ repent- 
ance,” “faith,” and “obedience.” While assuming the 
legitimacy of sacrifice, they do not, as we have seen, recog- 
nize its necessity for salvation. Their attitude is reflected 
in the Psalmist’s words : 


“ Sacrifice and offering thou hast no delight in; 
Burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not required.” 
(Ps. x1. 6; ef: li. 16.) 


To them, also, “the sacrifices of God are a_ broken 
spirit, a broken and a contrite heart” (Ps. li. 17). 
The Deuteronomic legislation evinces the prophetic spirit 
in teaching that so soon as Israel turns to the Lord and 
obeys his voice, he will pour out upon the people the 
fulness of his favor (Deut. xxx. 1-10). Isaiah calls 
upon the people not to offer sacrifices, but to forsake 
their sins, which, though they be as scarlet, shall be made 
white as snow (Is. i. 11-18). Ezekiel is equally emphatic 
in teaching that repentance and renunciation of sin are 


30 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


the indispensable conditions of securing the divine blessing 
(Ezek. ch. xxxvi). Not that there is amy merit in re- 
pentance; not that it establishes any claim upon God. 
His favor is free and undeserved (Is. xliii. 265). For- 
giveness is according to his nature, and repentance for 
the sin which bars its exercise is simply its necessary 
correlative. 

We have only another aspect of the same doctrine in 
the teaching which emphasizes faith or trust, since faith 
is only the positive side of repentance. As repentance is 
remorse and sorrow for sin, so faith is the assurance of 
forgiveness and acceptance with God. It was from an 
Old Testament prophet that Paul derived his motto 
text, “The just shall live by his faith” (Hab. ii. 4), 
that is, by his constancy, his fidelity, his trust in Yahweh. 
In the prophets, as in the Psalms, this idea is expressed in 
no technical form, but in a considerable variety of phrases, 
such as trusting Yahweh, trusting in his name, waiting 
upon him, and the like (Nah. i. 7; Zeph. iii. 12; Is. viii. 
17). While we have not here the formal doctrine of 
justification by faith, we have its essential elements in 
the teaching that God’s chief requirement is that men 
should put their trust in him and cleave to him in hope 
and confidence. 

Another element of the same teaching is that which 
insists upon the necessity of obedience. Here the pro- 
phetic spirit is well expressed in the saying, “ To obey is 
better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams ” 
(1 Sam. xv. 22). No single word better summarizes 
what God requires of man than the word “obedience.” 
Jeremiah depicts Yahweh as perpetually calling to his 
people every morning, saying, “ Obey my voice” (Jer. xi. 
7). The most grievous sins will be forgiven to those 
who amend their ways and obey the voice of the Lord 
(Jer. xxvi. 13). Obedience is readily seen to be the 
counterpart of repentance and the consequence of faith. 
One who turns from sin must turn to holiness, that is, to 
the life of obedience to God. So trust in God necessarily 
passes over into obedience, the making of the divine will 


THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION 31 


at once the law and the delight of the soul. What obedi- 
ence is conceived to include will depend upon the religious 
conceptions which are dominant at any given time. We 
have already seen that for the prophets it consisted, pri- 
marily, not in outward rites, but in a good life. True 
obedience, as conceived by them, cannot be better de- 
scribed than by the words: “ ‘To do justly, to love mercy, 
and to walk humbly with God” (Mi. vi. 8). 

We turn next to the inquiry: What place do the 
prophets assign to the idea of an inward renewal by a 
divine operation? We find that the righteous life is 
not regarded merely as a matter of human striving and 
achievement. Man must, indeed, freely turn to God, but 
he turns in response to influences and incentives which 
always anticipate his choice and action. “Turn thou me, 
and I will turn” (Jer. xxxi. 18) is the prayer of the peni- 
tent. Yahweh writes his law in the heart (Jer. xxxi. 
33); he bestows a new heart, and puts his spirit within 
men, causing them to walk in his statutes and keep his 
judgments (Ezek. xxxvi. 26, 27). He imparts the breath 
of a new life to the dry bones which the prophet saw in 
vision (Ezek. xxxvii. 1-14), and they live again. This 
conviction that God must renew the heart by the work of 
his Spirit comes to its most striking expression in the 
Psalmist’s prayer : 

“Create in me a clean heart, O God; 
And renew a right spirit within me. 
Cast me not away from thy presence; 
And take not thy holy spirit from me. 
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation ; 
And uphold me with a willing spirit.” 
(Ps. li. 10-12.) 


This whole Psalm illustrates a close approximation, in 
Old Testament piety, to the Christian doctrine of regenera- 
tion. The sense of sin is here so deepened that the sup- 
pliant feels keenly his own impotence. God must cleanse 
him if he is to be cleansed. Hence the prayers: “ Blot 
out my transgressions ; wash me from mine iniquity and 
cleanse me from my sin” (wv. 1, 2). 


32 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


It is doubtless true that a considerable part of this 
language has a collective, rather than a personal, reference.? 
Such is clearly the case, for example, in Ezekiel’s deserip- 
tion of the revival of the dry bones. The exilice prophets 
never lost sight of the national prospects and the national 
ideal. Still, the deepening and ethicizing of the idea of 
salvation could not but give that idea a bearing for the 
life of the individual. It is impossible to conceive of men 
repenting, obeying, and trusting Yahweh merely en masse. 
The very inwardness of the righteous life, as the prophets 
conceived it, gave it a personal character. A nation may 
be ceremonially righteous, but it cannot be morally so 
except by the purification in heart and life of the indi- 
viduals which compose it. 

One other prophetic idea claims our attention : salvation 
by vicarious suffering. The classical illustration of this 
idea is found in the picture of the suffering Servant of 
Yahweh in Deutero-Isaiah. Adumbrations of the idea are 
found in Jeremiah. The faithful and true were suffer- 
ing the consequences of others’ sins. ‘ Our fathers have 
sinned, and are not ; and we have borne their iniquities” 
(Lam. vy. 7). But it is only in the exilic Isaiah that the 
conception is elaborated. In his earlier chapters he intro- 
duces Yahweh’s Servant Israel, as fulfilling a divinely ap- 
pointed mission of revelation and salvation to the world.? 
As the description proceeds, darker colors play into the 
picture. The Servant sees the trials which must attend 
his work. His very fidelity will involve him in contempt 
and suffering. The description culminates in that ideal- 
ization of Israel as the oppressed and suffering, but victori- 
ous and saving Servant of God which we find in chapters 
li. 13-liii. 12. 

This description has its historical motive in the experi- 
ence of Israel in exile. The disobedient did not suffer ; 
they did not lament the national disaster or interpret it 
as a divine chastisement. It was the faithful who felt the 
exile as a calamity and a punishment upon the nation ; it 


1See J. V. Bartlet, Art. Regeneration in Hastings’s D. B. 
2 Fg. xiii. 6; xlix. 6, 


THE PROPHETIC DOCTRINE OF SALVATION 33 


was they who smarted keenly under the severity of their 
heathen masters. Thus the good portion of the nation 
suffered what the faithless really deserved. But Yahweh 
must have a purpose to serve in this experience of his 
faithful ones. By this fiery trial he must intend to purify 
and save the nation as a whole and, specifically, to recover 
the careless and faithless. Thus the faithful remnant — 
those who represent the ideal Israel— become the say- 
iours of the rest. They thus accomplish the divine will in 
the redemption of the nation, and so in the accomplishment 
of the nation’s mission to the world. This company of 
God’s true servants, collectively and ideally viewed, are 
here personified as an individual. He shall deal wisely 
and achieve victory (lii. 13-15). Men shall see that 
though despised and rejected, he had borne not his own 
but their sins and sorrows in order to bring to them peace 
and salvation (lil. 1-6). For no fault of his own did he 
suffer, but only for others’ good. It was the divine will 
that he should thus pass through the depths of humiliation 
and chastisement in order to win the triumph of suffering 
love in the salvation of many (lili. T-12).! 

We have here a new element in Jewish Messianism : 
the idea of the righteous suffering with and for the guilty 
in order to secure their salvation. It is to be noted that 
the office of the Servant is prophetic, not priestly. It is 
the suffering of actual experience which falls upon him. 
The vicariousness is ethical. The blood of this offering 
is the blood of real life. If we are to use the word “ sub- 
stitution ” we should say that the substitution here involved 


1 Tt is not intended to suggest that the Servant designates merely the 
pious kernel within Israel. I understand the term to designate the 
nation as a whole, not, indeed, in its concrete character, but in its ideal 
intention and destination as God’s messenger to the nations. But this 
conception of the nation as a whole appears to have been developed from 
the experience of the few in their endurance of suffering on account of, 
and on behalf of, the many. See the thorough investigation of F. Giese- 
brecht, Der Knecht Jahves des Deuterojesaia (Konigsberg, 1902), whose 
view (like that of Kautsch, D. B., Vol. V., p. 707 sg.) is that Is. lili. 1 sq. 
is to be understood as spoken by the Gentiles, and that Israel’s sufferings 
in exile are thought to be designed for their benefit, rather than for the 
benefit of Israel itself. 


34 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


is that which takes place when one puts himself under 
another’s burden, and from love and sympathy makes that 
other’s suffering lot his own. This idealization of God’s 
holy Servant is not created out of materials drawn from the 
Levitical ritual, but was produced out of Israel’s experi- 
ence of trial and suffering, illumined by an invincible 
faith in God’s purpose of grace. 

Let us now summarize the elements of prophetic teach- 
ing which approximate most closely to the Christian doc- 
trine of salvation. They are chiefly these: (1) Salvation 
is not primarily a national or collective, but an individual, 
affair. (2) It is, above all, an ethical process —the re- 
covery of the life from sin to harmony with God through 
moral likeness to him. (3) The conditions on which this 
salvation must be realized are, accordingly, moral. Man 
cannot be set right before God by any ceremony or trans- 
action performed on his behalf. He must personally re- 
pent of his sin and forsake it. (4) But in so doing man 
can never anticipate the grace of God, nor does he achieve 
his salvation without the divine aid. (6) The experience 
of the righteous bearing the sins of the unrighteous in 
Israel is adapted to suggest the thought of a divine vica- 
rious suffering in which a greater than human love should 
take the woes and burdens of sinful men upon itself. 


1 One reference only to the ritual is found. His soul is made a guilt 
offering (liii. 10) (not ‘‘ offering for sin,’’ as in our versions). This offer- 
ing was an act of reparation. The reference to it here contemplates 
the sin as an affront to God’s honor which, however, is sustained, as if 
in reparation, by the life of the righteous Servant. The textual diffi- 
culties of the verse as a whole are very great. Duhm says, ‘‘ Es ist 
zweifelhaft, ob wir jemals den urspriinglichen Wortlaut und Sinn 
herausbringen.’’ Comm. in loco. The apparent reference to the cultus 
in lii. 15 (Eng. vss., ‘*So shall he sprinkle many nations”) disappears 
in the translation adopted by almost all exegetes, ‘‘so shall he cause 
to rise up in admiration, that is, startle (R. V. marg.) many nations.” 


CHAPTER III 


THE TEACHING OF JESUS ACCORDING TO THE SYNOPTIC 
GOSPELS 


WE now approach the question: What does salvation 
mean in the teaching of Jesus ?M He declared that he 
came to seek and to save the lost. Just what was it 
which he came to do, and by what means did he propose 
to accomplish it? He frequently expressed the purpose 
of his mission in another set of terms of which we should 
here take account. He came to found the Kingdom of 
God and to induce men to enter it.’ To be saved and to 
enter the Kingdom of God must mean substantially the 
same. He also spoke of men becoming sons of God and 
of being like God. In view of such expressions there is 
hardly room for doubt as to what the idea of salvation 
was as it lay in the mind of Jesus. It is the life of obedi- 
ence to God, or, more fundamentally stated, it is the life 
of sonship or moral likeness to God. Jesus came into the 
world to save men in the sense that he came to win them, 
to help them to the living of the life of fellowship with 
God and of likeness to him. 

Now this general and rather formal statement requires 
for its elucidation a study of several questions : What is 
man to be saved from and why does he need to be saved ? 
What is he saved to? If to obedience or likeness to God, 
what does that involve? On what terms and conditions 
may this deliverance take place? What must a man do 
to be saved? And finally: How does Jesus effect this 
salvation? By what means does he promote or procure 


1] have reviewed in detail the passages bearing on our present sub- 
ject in The Theology of the New Testament, Pt. I., chs. ix. and x., to which 
Irefer the reader. I shall take for granted a general familiarity with the 
texts. 


35 


36 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


that harmony with God which constitutes man’s true 
blessedness, here and hereafter? We shall try to answer 
these questions in the light of the teaching of Jesus as 
reported in the Synoptic Gospels, reserving for later con- 
sideration the Johannine version. 

The reason why men need to be saved is that they are 
morally lost. They need to be saved from sin. Jesus, 
indeed, spoke of men being saved from sickness and from 
suffering, but prevailingly he described salvation as a 
moral recovery from an evil life. He did not speak of sin 
and sinners in that technical sense common in his time, 
according to which “sinners” denoted a class almost as 
definite as “ publicans.” For Jesus the term “sinner” did 
not classify a man in public estimation or social standing ; 
it described his moral state in the sight of God. Sin is a 
corrupt state of the heart, a perversion of the will and the 
affections, a radical disharmony with God. More con- 
cretely, it is lovelessness, that is selfishness, with the evils 
which it engenders. Jesus did not give definitions or 
theoretic descriptions of sin, but his treatment of individ- 
ual cases leaves us in no doubt as to what sin is. It is 
seen in the unfilial life of that lost son who repudiates all 
his natural obligations to his father and friends, abandons 
all restraints, and gives himself over to a life of selfish 
gratification. It is seen in the Pharisee with his counter- 
feit piety, trying for social advantage to seem what he 
inwardly knows he is not. It is seen in the hardness, 
the cruelty, the intolerance of the rich and ruling classes 
of the age; in the pitilessness of a priest and a Leyite 
who put social distinctions above humanity, and in a 
people who carefully observe their inherited traditions 
and tithe mint and anise and cummin to the neglect of 
judgment, mercy, and the love of God. These are 
examples of sin as Jesus views it. They are the “lost” 
who are forfeiting their lives in selfishness in its various 
forms, — pride, hypocrisy, sensuality, cruelty, hatred. All 
these sins are but various phases of that self-gratification 
or self-will in which man loses his real, true self. 

From this kind of life men need to be saved. This can 


THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 37 


be done in but one way,—by a change in their motives 
and purposes. The sinful life can only be abandoned by 
being replaced. Love must supplant selfishness ; kind- 
ness, humility, and sympathy must replace hardness, 
arrogance, and indifference. Men are to be saved to the 
life of service and helpfulness; they must learn that to 
give their lives is to save them. 

Jesus’ idea of salvation centres in his idea of God. His 
most characteristic description of God is as the bountiful 
Giver. With liberal hand he pours out his blessings upon 
all mankind. His love is large and generous. He is 
ready and eager to bestow his gifts. This impulse to give 
and to bless springs from God’s boundless, universal love. 
Jesus’ favorite expression for this aspect of God’s character 
is the term “ Father.” As the Father he loves and blesses 
all men — even his disobedient and sinful children. He 
yearns for the lost son and waits and watches for his 
return ; he continues to love those who are indifferent, or 
even hostile, to his will, and sends his Son to seek and to 
save them. 

Now salvation means a life corresponding to this char- 
acter of God. Jesus expressed it by the phrase “ becom- 

~ ing sons of the Father” (Mt. v. 45). Sonship in the 
Hebraistic mode of thought denotes moral kinship and 
likeness. Jesus shows how by niggardliness, pride, and 
hatred men prove themselves to be no true sons of God. 
When they love only those who serve them, hate their 
enemies, and revenge every injury, they show themselves 
no better than the despised publicans and heathen. Such 
is not the Godlike life. He is the righteous, the truly 
saved man who has become like the Father in love and 
self-giving. Jesus illustrates in detail the elements which 
constitute this true righteousness or salvation. They are 
such as humility, meekness, aspiration after goodness, 
mercifulness, purity, peacemaking. These qualities con- 
stitute that real righteousness which is the passport into 

+ the Kingdom of heaven (Mt. v. 3-9, 20). 

Other descriptions tally with this. In the judgment 
parable the accepted are those who have loved and served 


38 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


others; the rejected are those who have neglected and 
* despised their fellow-men (Mt. xxv. 35 sqg.). The man 
who fulfilled Jesus’ law of neighbor love was he, social 
outcast though he was, who ministered to the poor sufferer 
>at the roadside (Lk. x. 36, 37). The first and great 
- commandment, which summarizes the whole import of the 
law and the prophets, is the law of love. In comparison 
with the requirements of this law all sacrifices and other 
religious ceremonies are of slight consequence. Love is 
the law, not, primarily, because God enjoins it, but because 
it is the principle of his own moral perfection. His 
requirements are grounded in his nature. The life of 
love is the Godlike life; it is the life of sonship; it con- 
stitutes men members of the Kingdom of heaven; it is 
S salvation. 

This teaching of Jesus which I have thus sought to sum- 
marize is no mere sentimental doctrine. Itis not wanting in 
strictness and severity. It does not minimize the require- 
ments of holiness. If the statement of it appears to do so, 
this is due to the fact that Jesus does not separate right- 
eousness and love, as later thought has done. To him 
these are never contrasted and rival terms. He knows 
nothing of a love which is not holy and morally exacting ; 
nothing of a righteousness which is mere retributive jus- 
tice. For him purity is as truly a part of love as mer- 
cifulness. Love exacts confession and repentance for 
wilful injustice as truly as it demands readiness to for- 

S give (Lk. xvii.4). Love is no mere easy good nature. 
It rebukes and punishes evil, while it yearns to forgive 
and cure it. There is no lack of strenuousness in our 
Lord’s doctrine of salvation. The divine love repudiates 
and condemns sin, and there is no salvation which is not 

salvation from sin to holiness. 

« What, then, must a man do in order to be saved? He 

~ must repent of his sins and forsake them. The first word 
in Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom was, “ Repent ye” 

4 (Mk. i. 15). But not only must men repent ; they must 

+turn (Mt. xviii. 3) — turn away from the old life, and in 
humility and self-surrender take up the life of obedience 


=A te oe 7 


fs 


THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 39 


to God. Both these aspects of the matter are expressed 
in the term “faith” —faith in God or belief on Christ 
himself. Faith is the positive counterpart of repentance. 
In the parable of the Lost Son penitence is illustrated in 
the prodigal’s remorse and misery ; faith is the resolution 
and act of returning to his home and his father. Our 
Lord’s descriptions of the conditions of salvation are not 
abstract and formal, but concrete and realistic. Men must 
become as little children in humility and trustfulness, must 
take his yoke of instruction and discipline upon them, must 
bear his cross of sacrifice and service, must do the will of 
the Father, must take up the duties of membership in his 
Kingdom and cultivate the virtues required by its law, must 
become like the Father himself whose perfection is love. 
Such are some of the principal ways in which Jesus 
spoke of salvation. Men must become and live as God’s 
true sons, obedient to his will, trustful in his care, morally 
like him in motive and purpose. Jesus had no favorite 
formula by which he expressed the nature and conditions 
of salvation, such, for example, as justification by faith. 
It may be due, in part, to this fact that so far as our popu- 
lar and theological terminology for the discussion of the 
subject is scriptural, it is derived much more largely from 
the language of others than from that of Jesus himself. 
But neither did Jesus analyze the process of attaining sal- 
vation nor define its various steps and stages. He made no 
attempt to describe the codperation of the divine and hu- 
man factors in the saved life. He pictured the Father’s 
house as standing open, and the Father’s heart as ready and 
waiting to receive the wandering, lost son. It lay within 
the power of the erring son to forsake his evil life and 


- escape his wretchedness by returning to his Father with 


a penitent and obedient heart. When one recalls the 
subtleties connected with the theological discussions of the 
ordo salutis, the teaching of Jesus on the subject does 
seem, in comparison, very simple. One cannot read the- 
ological books without meeting frequent intimations of 
its inadequacy. We are told, for example, that Jesus 
could not unfold his full doctrine of salvation until his 


( 


40 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


own saving mission to mankind was completed, or, even, 
that the final doctrine of salvation could not be unfolded 
by our Lord at all, but only by those who came after and 
could look back upon what he had done to save men. To 
expect an adequate doctrine of salvation in the teaching of 
Jesus (it is said) is to look for an unnatural anticipation ; 
it is to require an anachronism. Is this contention in- 
tended as an indirect confession that the current theologi- 
cal theories have only a slight or uncertain connection 
with the teaching of Jesus? 

We shall keep these questions in mind as we proceed. 
Meantime, they suggest our next inquiry: In what way 
did Jesus present himself as the Saviour of men? By 
what means did he seek to bring men into the life of son- 
ship to God? To this question, as to the preceding, we 
ean give no one definite, explicit answer. The saving 
work of Jesus is expressed in a great variety of forms. 
He came to call sinners to repentance. He bade men 
learn of him that they might find rest unto their souls. 
In his mountain sermon he depicted the nature and re- 
quirements of true righteousness, the conditions of en- 
trance into the Kingdom of God, and the characteristics of 
its members. These cannot be easily summarized in any 
formula; but we may say, in general, that the discourse 
demands moral purity, humility, charitableness, and kin- 
dred virtues, and does not scruple to require 6 good 
works” in one who would glorify the Father in heaven 
(Mt. v. 16). In one place he declares that only he who 
does the will of God can enter his Kingdom, and elsewhere 
he prescribes the law of service as the law of that King- 
dom. When we further observe that he conceives his 
own mission as a mission of service to humanity, we see 
that one of his saving works was to induce men by ex- 
ample and influence to live the Godlike life of self-giving, 
in which man’s true greatness and glory are found. He 
appeared among men as their servant ; he came to min- 
ister and to give his life for others. He must have re- 
garded it as a part of his saving work to induce others 
thus to save their lives by giving them. 


( 


THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 41 


y Jesus evidently contemplated his teaching and example 
as saving in their effect upon men. He sought by these 
means to quicken in men desires and efforts for a better 
=> life —the life of sonship to God, which is salvation. He 
presented a conception of God which was attractive and 
adapted to move the heart to penitence for sin and to 
gratitude and obedience. He illustrated the Godlike life 
> among men in his benevolent works, in his sympathy with 
suffering, and in the encouragement which he gave to every 
good aspiration and endeavor. He set the highest value 
upon small deeds, if done from love or pity, and declared 
that he who even received into his favor a righteous man 
because he was a righteous man, should receive a right- 
eous man’s reward. The life of Jesus, with its various 
expressions of itself in word and act, was a power- 
ful saving agency in his time, and still remains such. 
The teaching of Jesus gives us no warrant to speak so 
slightingly as is commonly done of his mere example. 
Theology is generally so eager to hurry on into its own 
special sphere that it can barely take time to mention 
in passing the saving power of the personal influence 
of Jesus, making haste to assure us in the midst of the 
allusion that this is not all. We shall reach the favorite 
province of theology in due course; only let us not mini- 
mize by silence or by qualifying words what Jesus placed 
in the very forefront of his message to mankind, — the 
declaration that the door of God’s Kingdom stood open 
sbefore them that they might enter then and there if they 
' would, and that he had come to show them the way. I 
‘ am the world’s light; by me men know the Father, God’s 
‘ Kingdom is in your midst — by such words as these Jesus 
‘announced a present salvation, available at the moment, 
and himself as the guide to its realization. 

Now, at length, we come to the question with which 
theology has been chiefly occupied: What significance for 
his saving work did Jesus attribute to his sufferings and 
death? Let us first review the passages in which he 
speaks of his death, and then inquire into their signifi- 
cance. It was quite late in his public career, according 


42 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


to our sources, when he began to teach his disciples that 
he must suffer death (Mk. viii. 31; Mt. xvi. 21). His 
Galilean ministry was nearing its close, and he was soon to 
set his face toward Jerusalem. While he was on a journey 
through the north country, occurred the memorable con- 
fession of his messiahship by Peter at Caesarea Philippi. 
It was at this turning-point in his own career, and at this 
crisis in his disciples’ faith, that he took oceasion to tell 
them plainly that he was destined to suffer and to die. 
After this time the same announcement is repeatedly 
made.! All the Synoptics also report in the narrative 
of the early Galilean ministry a figurative saying which 
appears to contain a reference to his approaching fate: 
“But the days will come when the bridegroom shall be 
taken away from them, and then will they fast in that 
day ” (Mk. ii. 20 = Mt. ix. 15 = Lk. v. 85). If the refer- 
ence in this passage as it stands is to his own death, 
as seems probable, it is difficult to reconcile it with the 
long silence of Jesus which follows, with the disciples’ 
resistance to the idea, and with the statement that it 
was at Cesarea Philippi that Jesus “began to teach” 
his disciples about his death. It is probable, then, that 
this verse either belongs in some later connection, or is 
an allegorizing application of the parabolic saying to 
which it is appended, the product of subsequent reflec- 
tion on the part of the disciples.2, Other passages,® some- 
times appealed to in support of the idea that Jesus early 
foretold his death, are seen, on examination, to be quite 
irrelevant. The evidence, however, is sufficient to show 
that from Peter’s confession onward, Jesus explicitly fore- 
told his death,‘ and it is extremely probable that his con- 
viction in regard to his fate was not new when, for the 
first time, he announced it at Czsarea Philippi. The 
passages thus far referred to, however, say nothing about 

1 Lk. ix. 31; Mk. ix. 31 and par.; x. 33 and par.; xii. 8 and par.; 
xiv. 8. 

2 Cf. Hollmann, Die Bedeutung des Todes Jesu, p. 16 sq. 

8 F.g. Mt. v. 10-12 ; Lk. vi. 22 sq. 

4 The genuineness of the passages which constitute this evidence is well 
discussed by W, L, Walker in Zhe Cross and the Kingdom, pp. 37-63, 


THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 43 


the saving import of his death. But there are two others 
which explicitly connect his death with his saving work — 
the saying in which he declares that he came to give his 
life “a ransom for many” (Mk. x. 45 = Mt. xx. 28), and 
his reference to the purpose of his death at the institution 
of the memorial Supper (Mk. xiv. 24; Mt. xxvi. 28; 
ke xx. 19,’ 20). 

Now the questions which one would like to answer 
regarding this subject are these: Can we derive from 
the general teaching of Jesus, or from the course of 
his life, any plausible view of the significance which he 
would naturally attribute to his death? What is the 
meaning of the phrase, “a ransom for many” (Avrpov 
avtt mokXOv)? In what sense was his body broken (or 
“oiven”) and his blood shed “for” (é7ép) the dis- 
ciples (Lk. “for you”) or “for many” (Mk. and 
Mt.)? In what connection, if any, do these expressions 
stand with Old Testament conceptions? How far do 
we have here, or in other relevant passages in the 
Synoptics, materials for a theory respecting the saving 
power of the cross? 

Let us start from a point on which all will be agreed. 
Jesus often represented the true life of sonship to God as 
a life of humility and of service, and referred to his own 
career as the typical illustration of it. The giving of life 
is not to him the mere experience of dying. It is rather 
that self-giving for others, which ends in larger life. 
There can be no doubt that Jesus connected his death 
with the idea of his service, his self-giving, to mankind. 
He came to minister and to give his life. He is to die in 
the service of men. 

If, now, we ask in what way Jesus would naturally have 
been led to the conviction that he must die a violent 
death at Jerusalem, the most reasonable answer is that he 
would reach this conclusion from the increased hostility 
which he met with in his work. He saw the jealousy and 
hatred of the rulers and influential classes deepening 
around him day by day. What more natural than for 
him to conclude that his career must end in a violent 


44 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


death? This supposition agrees with the actual course of 
events, and our sources suggest no other explanation. If 
it was in this way that the prospect of being put to death 
opened before him, it would be altogether natural that he 
should see that experience as a part, or culmination, of his 
service of self-denying love to mankind. And this, as we 
have seen, is the light in which he contemplates his death. 

We should expect, however, that one who, like Jesus, 
regarded his life-work and experience as providentially 
appointed, would look upon even this violent death which 
he saw impending over him, in the light of a divinely 
ordered event, and such we find to be the case. The 
necessity that he should suffer many things and be killed 
is, to his consciousness, something more than a certainty 
arising from the circumstances in which he finds himself 
placed ; it is included in the divine purpose which is the 
source and warrant of his mission. The effort to deter- 
mine the ground of that necessity and to show what was 
accomplished by our Lord’s submission to it, is the great 
motive of the various theories regarding the saving import 
of his death. So far as these theories have made use of 
materials derived from the Synoptics, they have been con- 
structed almost exclusively upon inferences drawn from 
the ransom passage, the words of Jesus at the Supper, 
and the exclamation on the cross, ‘My God, my God, 
why hast thou forsaken me?” Before we turn our atten- 
tion to these sayings, however, I would suggest the inquiry 
whether we may not best approach these particular texts 
and our general problem from a consideration of Jesus’ 
conception of his life-work as a whole. Leaving aside for 
the moment our immediate subject, I will illustrate the 
method which I have in mind. Every student of the 
Gospels knows the difficulty of reaching any clear and con- 
sistent view of Jesus’ teaching concerning his. parousia 
from a study of the relevant texts taken by themselves. 
The only hope of a solution for the difficulties is found in 
a study of Jesus’ conception of the nature and coming of 
his Kingdom. In this way we obtain a test or measure by 
means of which the various individual apocalyptic sayings 


THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 45 


may be estimated and interpreted. In like manner, is it 
not more probable that we shall find the right clew to 
Jesus’ own thought of the import of his death by keeping 
close to his own predominant conception, than it is that 
we shall find it by inferences derived from word studies of 
- AUTpov and dvabyjxn? But let us turn to the much-debated 
words and phrases.1 

Jesus and a company of his disciples were making their 
way toward Jerusalem. He knew that the end was near. 
There, under the very shadow of the cross, James and 
John proffered their ambitious request. In reply he told 
them that to exercise power was the prerogative of world 
rulers, but that the law of his Kingdom was service, and 
then added, “ For verily the Son of man came not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a 
ransom for many” (Mk. x. 45 = Mt. xx. 28). What 
does the phrase “ransom for, or instead of, many ” (AvTpov 
avTt joAXA@v) mean? It would seem from the occasion 
which gave rise to the saying of which it is a part, as well 
as from the connection, amounting almost to parallelism, in 
which it stands, that it must be intended to express some 
phase or aspect of that ministry or service in which Jesus 
sums up the purpose of his mission. But, in fact, exegetes 
and theologians have generally isolated the phrase and 
have made it the subject of painstaking special study. 

For its explanation, recourse has commonly been had to 
the Old Testament through the Septuagint. There the 
word Avtpov is most frequently the translation of one 
or the other of two Hebrew words, one of which denotes 
the redemption price paid to secure the freedom of a 
slave, the other the “covering” or sacrificial gift 
(kopher) which was made to atone for sin. Now, the 
theories of the meaning of our phrase have usually been 

1 The topics which, in the remainder of this chapter, are briefly dis- 
cussed, are treated at length from different points of view by Hollmann, 
op. cit.; R. A. Hoffmann, Der Tod Christi in seiner Bedeutung fiir die 
Erlosung ; Feine, Jesus Christus und Paulus ; R. J. Drummond, Apos- 
tolic Teaching and Christ’s Teaching ; Babut, La Pensée de Jésus sur 


sa Mort @aprés les Evangiles Synoptiques, and Holtzmann, Neutest. 
Theol., in which the literature of the subject is extensively cited. 


46 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


drawn from one or the other of these supposed Old Tes- 
tament references. But when it had been decided which 
of these two possible meanings to adopt, nothing was 
really settled. If the former, it still remained to ask: Is 
Avrpov to be taken literally or figuratively, and is avré to be 
joined with Avzpov only or with the whole phrase? If with 
the latter, the question remained whether Avtpov denotes 
a covering by expiation or by protection? But one’s con- 
fidence in this whole method of explanation is somewhat 
shaken when he observes that Avtpov is used by the Sey- 
enty to translate four different Hebrew words. Moreover, 
when we recall that Jesus spoke Aramaic, and not Greek, 
it is clear that the question which is of real importance here 
is not which Septuagint meaning of AvTpov is most feasi- 
ble, but of what Aramaic word Avtpov is the probable 
translation or equivalent. Hollmann has, I think, given 
cogent reasons for believing that it was not the Aramaic 
cognate of kopher.1 If this view be taken, then the ex- 
planation would need to be derived either from the other 
Septuagint terms most frequently translated Avtpov (some 
form of the roots 7718, to ransom, or 5x3, to deliver or save), 
or (if the explanation of the word be no longer sought 
in the Septuagint) from the Aramaic equivalent for the 
actual Syriac renderings of Avzpov (akin to the Hebrew root 
pre, to set free).2 In either of these cases the mean- 
ing of the term would be a purchase price, a payment to 
obtain freedom, or, dropping the figure, a means of freeing 
or saving. If Avzpov meant a sacrifice, then avré might 
naturally mean “instead of”; if, however, it denotes a 
purchase price, the force of av7é would probably be, 
“for” in the sense of “in exchange, or compensation, for,” 
as in Heb. xii. 2: “who for (av7/) the joy that was set 
before him,” that is, in order to obtain the joy, “endured 
the cross,” etc. The passage in question would then 
mean: He gave himself as a ransom price for (the sake 
of purchasing or obtaining) the freedom of many; through 
giving his life he procured the deliverance of many. On 
general grounds this seems to me to be the more reason- 


1 Op. cit., p. 105 sq. 2 So Hollmann, op. cit., pp. 108, 109. 


THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 47 


able view. It is much more natural that, in the connec- 
tion in which he is speaking, Jesus should introduce a 
figurative expression like that of giving his life to procure 
men’s freedom, than that he should define his work in 
terms drawn from the Levitical ritual. The occasion and 
context of the phrase in question should not be lost out 
of mind. He is contrasting worldly greatness with true 
greatness. Worldly rulers find their greatness in “ lording 
it” over others, that is, in subjecting them; he, on the 
contrary, achieves his greatness through ministering and 
setting men free. They enslave ; he liberates. 

But if we conclude that the natural meaning of the 
phrase is: I came to give my life as a means of procur- 
ing the liberty of many, it still remains to ask : From what 
does Jesus liberate men by means of his death, and how 
does his death accomplish or aid that liberation? Our 
sources afford no direct answer, and we are left to infer- 
ence and conjecture. The most various replies have been 
given: From the wrath of God; from the guilt of sin; 
from sin itself ; from the fear of suffering and death ; from 
bondage to such worldly and selfish thoughts as James and 
John had just been expressing. If, now, we lay aside the 
figurative form of the expression, the idea with which we 
have to deal is this: the death of Jesus is a means of de- 
livering men. We have seen that he regarded his death 
as part and parcel of his saving mission, the culmination 
of his life of service and self-giving. It is obvious, then, 
that we cannot ascribe to his death some meaning which 
isolates it from his life and work in general. Jesus not 
only never made any such separation between his life 
and his death, but he distinctly connected and correlated 
them. The saving import of his death is generically the 
same as that of his life. a 

Now the purpose of his life was to save men from sin, 
or, in other words, to make them members of the Kingdom 
of God. How did Jesus conceive that his death would 
serve this end? Did he mean that after his death, and 
largely in consequence of it, many who had thus far re- 
jected him would repent of their sin and so fulfil the 


. 48 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


condition of entrance into the Kingdom of God? Did he 
foresee that, though his death seemed at the moment to be 
the disproof of his messiahship, it would soon be seen to 
be the chief evidence of it? Was his thought that his 
death incurred in absolute fidelity to his divinely ap- 
pointed life-work, was the consummate proof of the divine 
love and so the highest expression of love’s constraining 
power? Did he conceive of his experience of death as a 
victory over death, alike for himself and for those who 
would choose and live the kind of life which he had illus- 
trated? AsI have said, we are here in the field of infer- 
ence. ( What is clear to me is that the saving power of 
his death is to be understood in the light of the aim and 
import of his life of which it is the consummation.) In 
this view we shall seek for the meaning of such language 
as we are considering neither in the popular Jewish notions 
associated with the sacrificial ritual, nor in the dogmatic 
reflections of later times, but in Jesus’ own explanations 
of his coming and his work. He came to found the King- 
dom of God in the world. He died in the achievement of 
that result, and his death was a potent means to its achieve- 
ment. He came to die, if his death was necessary to that 
result, as it proved to be. But the direct aim of his com- 
ing is uniformly represented as the recovery of men to 
sonship to God. How his death, in point of fact, has 
served this end, and still serves it, is a pertinent inquiry 
which we shall keep in mind. The result to which we 
are brought is, negatively stated, that the whole circle of 
later dogmatic ideas— atonement, penalty, substitution, 
satisfaction — has no place in the teaching of Jesus, so 
far as we have followed its development. But shall we, 
perhaps, find these conceptions in his language at the Sup- 
per or in his exclamation on the cross ? 

The earliest account of the words of Jesus spoken at 
the Last Supper is that given by Paul (1 Cor. xi. 
23-26). Assuming that the bread and wine are re- 
garded as symbolic or representative, the sayings which 
he reports would contain these two points of importance 
for our inquiry: (1) the bread is to remind the disciples 





THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 49 


of his death for (é7rép) them, on their behalf, or for their 
benefit; and (2) in the shedding of his blood the New 
Covenant is established and sealed. Luke’s version is 
almost identical with Paul’s (xxii. 19, 20). Mark (xiv. 28, 
24) has formal variations, but no really different features. 
In these three! earliest forms of narration the sense 
in which he is to die “for them” or “for many” 
is as undefined as is that of the statement that by his 
death he would procure the release of many. In Mat- 
thew, however, the meaning of wep is rendered more 
precise by the addition of the phrase, “unto (eis) the 
remission of sins” (xxvi. 28), that is, in order to secure 
the forgiveness of sins. Various considerations have led 
many critics to the opinion that this phrase is really an 
explanatory addition of the author’s own.2 The fact 
that it has no counterpart in any of the three earlier 
narratives, either in the form or the substance of their 
reports; the absence from the account of the covenant 
sacrifice referred to in the context, of any idea that 
by its means forgiveness is procured,? together with its 
apparent kinship to later reflection and its isolation in 
the teaching of Jesus in general—these facts, I say, 
do warrant serious doubts as to its authenticity. But 
if it be treated as genuine, it still requires to be inter- 
preted. It is not at all evident on the face of the state- 
ment in what sense, or in what way, the death of Jesus 
secures the forgiveness of sins. Before raising that ques- 
tion, or even before deciding whether our narratives con- 
tain anything which requires us to raise it, let us ask two 
others: (1) What is the relation of the Supper to the 
Passover meal? and (2) What is its relation to the cove- 
nant sacrifice which appears to be alluded to in all the 
narratives? 

The Synoptics place the Supper in evident temporal con- 


1 Or two, if Luke’s narrative be regarded as a replica of Paul’s. 

2««The words ‘for the remission of sins’ have been added; they are 
probably of the nature of a comment, expanding what is implied in the 
earlier form.’’ Rey. H. L. Wild, in Contentio Veritatis, p. 140. 

3 Cf. Ex. xxiv. 8. 


50 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


nection with the Jewish Passover meal. Paul regards the 
Supper as a Christian “assover (1 Cor. y. 7), and accord- 
ing to Luke, it is so designated in advance by Jesus him- 
self (Lk. xxii. 15). But it is a question which has been 
much debated, whether the Passover was a sacrifice or not. 
Assuming, as the more probable view, that it was such, it 
seems to have lost that character in actual usage in our 
Lord’s time, and to have become only a joyful feast in 
celebration of the nation’s deliverance from bondage. 
But, apart from that question, it is noticeable that the 
words of Jesus at the Supper do not seem to allude in 
any way to the meaning of the Passover festival. The 
symbolism employed is not derived from the Passover 
lamb, as it naturally would have been if Jesus had: had 
in mind a parallel to the Passover feast. Many scholars 
therefore doubt or deny any inner connection between the 
Supper and the meaning of the Passover.! But if we may 
not be warranted in going so far as this, we may say, with 
Holtzmann, that the language of Jesus on the occasion in 
question does not seem to establish any connection with 
the Passover beyond “the general thought of salvation.” ? 

It is rather to the sacrifice offered in connection with 
the ratification of the covenant at Sinai (Ex. xxiv) that 
the words of institution clearly relate. It is generally 
agreed that this was a sacrifice betokening fellowship with 
Yahweh. As the blood of that offering was conceived as 
the symbolic bond of connection between Yahweh and his 
people, so Jesus pictures his death as the act whereby 
the New Covenant is inaugurated and his blood as that 
whereby it was sealed. The Supper is, then, the symbolic 
ratification of the New Covenant, analogous to the solemn 
rite by which the ancient covenant was confirmed by an 
offering denoting the establishment of communion with 
God and participation in the blessings of his grace. If 
regard be had solely to the language of our Lord at the 
institution of the Supper, it must be admitted, I think, 
that it is adapted to carry our thoughts not in the direc- 


1 #.g. Jiilicher, Grafe, Spitta, Haupt, and Hoffmann, 
2 Neutest. Theol. 1. 299. 


THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 51 


tion of the current Jewish ideas of propitiation by sacri- 
fice, but rather toward the conception of a new relation of 
fellowship with God and obedienc. to him constituted by 
Jesus’ death. Apart from the phrase reported by Matthew 
alone (“for the forgiveness of sins”), we might say, with 
Titius, that the words of Jesus at the Supper are not to be 
explained by thoughts which relate to the forgiveness of 
sins, but by those which relate to the impartation of life. 

This rapid review of the points of exegesis and criticism 
which are in controversy is sufficient to show what con- 
siderations are to be kept in mind as we proceed. It must 
be apparent how limited is the material in our Synoptic 
Gospels to which we can appeal in our effort to answer 
the question: What was the saving significance of Jesus’ 
death? As between the older interpretations which found 
there the idea that his death was regarded by himself as a 
substitutionary sacrifice which satisfied the divine anger 
at sin and so procured its forgiveness, and such conclu- 
sions of modern scholars as have just been cited, the 
decision must turn mainly on the meaning of the word 
“ransom,” the question of the originality of Matthew’s 
added phrase, and the inference drawn from the cry on 
the cross. It is well known that the traditional theology 
has understood that cry as expressing Christ’s sense of 
desertion by God in his experience of bearing the world’s 
sin.2, To me it seems more accordant with the import of 
this Old Testament exclamation (for such it is; Ps. xxii. 
1), as well as more congruous with Jesus’ view of the 
reciprocal relation between the Father and himself, to sup- 
pose that abandonment to suffering, rather than abandon- 
ment to God’s displeasure or to desertion, is meant. It is 
a word from a Psalm in which the sufferings.of the right- 


1 Neutest. Lehre v. der Seligkeit, Th. I. p. 150. Hoffmann reaches a 
similar conclusion as the result of his investigation. He regards the ele- 
ments as symbolizing fellowship of life with Christ. 

2 So, e.g. Dale, Atonement, p. 61 sg.: ‘‘ Exile from the joys of God’s 
presence,’’ etc. A more cautious statement is made by Professor Denney, 
who finds ‘‘something unrealizable and even impious’’ in Calvin’s view 
that ‘‘Jesus endured in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned 
and lost man.’’ The Death of Christ, pp. 68, 64. 


be THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


eous for the wicked are depicted.1 The feeling of the 
righteous man that God is “ far from helping him” (v. 1), 
which finds strong expression in the exclamation in ques- 
tion, scarcely warrants the conclusion that God had 
actually “deserted,” that is, turned away his face from 
him. Such a supposition would be entirely out of har- 
mony with subsequent expressions of confidence in God’s 
presence and help (vw. 4,9, 19). That any one, on the 
basis of Jesus’ teaching alone, should have been led to 
associate with those words the idea that Christ was 
conscious of God’s displeasure or believed that God 
had withdrawn his presence from him, is to me quite 
inconceivable. 

Supposing, now, that we allow the originality of Mat- 
thew’s phrase, it needs, as I have intimated, to be 
interpreted. How Christ’s death promoted or secured 
the forgiveness of sins is not stated. It may be held 
that the only natural meaning is that he procured it by 
making a satisfaction for sin, by dying as the sinner’s 
substitute. Something would here depend, however, 
on how far we should read the phrase in the light of 
subsequent reflection. On every other theory, however, 
which attaches saving value to Christ’s death, it would 
hold good that his death was eis ageow apaptiav, ‘The 
case, then, stands thus: There are three phrases in ques- 
tion. The supposed sacrificial reference in the first phrase 
(Avrpov avti twoAA@Y) depends upon a very doubtful view 
of its connection with Septuagint usage, and the supposed 
substitutionary idea upon a strict construction of a term 
which is, in all probability, a figure of speech. The second 
phrase (*“ for remission of sins”) is of questionable original- 
ity, having no counterpart in Paul, Mark, or Luke, and is 
not, in any case, explicit in its bearing on our question. 
There remains the exclamation noticed, whose relation to 
our inquiry must be admitted to be remote and uncertain. 

I have no inclination to minimize the material in our 
sources which is available for our study; I could wish that 
it were much more abundant and more explicit. But I 


1 Cf, Is. lili. 


THE SYNOPTIC TEACHING OF JESUS 53 


desire to estimate it critically for just what it is, neither 
more nor less. I must say that I return from every 
review which I make of it with a new impression of the 
degree in which later theological theories have read their 
presuppositions and conclusions into the words of Jesus. 
I cannot help doubting whether the current ideas of 
dogmatic tradition — that of his death to procure the for- 
giveness of sins by placating divine justice, for example, 
could ever have been derived from the words of Jesus 
which the Synoptists report, if, indeed, they could ever 
have been suggested by them. Of course these ideas 
may be true, nevertheless. It is even conceivable that 
Jesus shared this thought-world in common with the 
Judaism of the period; but, if so, the evidence of the fact 
has not been preserved to us. To me it seems more likely 
that his thoughts about his death attached themselves to 
the picture of the Servant of Yahweh, whose function, as 
we have seen, was prophetic rather than priestly. One 
conclusion, at least, seems open to no doubt. In treating 
of our subject, theology has built too exclusively upon 
a few doubtful phrases and has too much neglected the 
general drift and content of Jesus’ teaching regarding 
the nature and method of salvation. 


, of salvation is the same as that of Jesus, altho 


CHAPTER IV 
THE PAULINE DOCTRINE_ 


PAUL’s general conception of the nature y) comuditions 

gh*it is de- 
veloped much more largely with reference to a future day 
of assize. Salvation is deliverance from sin and is realized 
in a life of holiness. Its initial conditions are repentance, 
renunciation of sin, and trust in the grace of God which 
has been manifested in Christ. But this general concep- 
tion is developed by the apostle with a fulness and variety 
of statement which are quite unparalleled in the New Tes- 
tament. Not only is Paul’s teaching the most elaborate 
which has been preserved to us from the primitive Church; 
it is also the earliest type of doctrine, if regard be had to 
the date of the writings in which it is embodied. When, 
therefore, we raise the question: What were the views of 
the first Christians regarding the salvation wrought by 
Christ, and especially respecting the saving value of 
his death? it is evident that Paul must be one of the 
sources of our answer. We may gain some impressions 
touching the thoughts of the first disciples on this subject 
from the closing chapters of the Synopties. More impor- 
tant still for our purpose are the reports of the apostolic 
discourses in the early chapters of Acts. But Paul’s 
written statements antedate these sources, and his relation 
to the primitive apostles was more direct than that of the 
authors of these narratives. The date and authorship 
of the Epistle of James are too uncertain and its aim too 
purely practical to warrant any effort to bring it to bear 
upon our problem. With respect to 1 Peter it must be 
admitted that criticism has made so strong a case for the 
theory that it was produced under Pauline influences, that 

54 


Wt 


———————— 


THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 55 


one hesitates to appeal to it as illustrating primitive 
Christian ideas.? 

Our sources of information for determining what were 
the primitive Christian views regarding our subject — 
especially the death of Jesus—are by no means so ade- 
quate as we could desire. But we shall be likely to 
learn as much, at least indirectly, from Paul as from any 
other source. On one capital point he is explicit: The 
primitive community had established a connection between 
the death of the Messiah and the salvation of men from 
sin. Nothing less than this can be meant by the state- 
ment, “For I delivered unto you first of all that which 
also I received, how that Christ died for our sins accord- 
ing to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. xv. 3). He here asserts 
that the representation of Messiah’s death as a means to 
the forgiveness or removal of sins held a primary place in 
that trustworthy tradition which he had received —a tra- 
dition which reached back to Jesus himself. The emphasis 
which the apostle places upon the cross in his doctrine of 
salvation is regarded by him as accordant with the belief 
and teaching of the primitive Christian community. 

As has been intimated, we have only limited resources 
for illustrating the views which were taken of their 
Master’s death by the first disciples. The Gospels make 
it clear that as the prediction of the event had struck 
them with dismay, so its occurrence had overwhelmed them 
in despair. It was the resurrection which enabled them 
to recover from their disappointment and to regain heart 
and hope. After that the disciples began to see that the 
death was only the shadow side of an experience through 
which the Christ must pass to his exaltation. He must 
pass through death in order to conquer death and-achieve 
his victory and his crown. They began to see the neces- 

1In my Theology of the New Testament (Pt. III. ch. ii; Pt. IV. ch. vii) 
I have reviewed the passages which bear upon our present theme more 
particularly than I here have space to do. To the appropriate chapters 
of this book I would, once for all, refer the reader for a survey of the 
texts which relate to each New Testament topic. Similarly I would refer 


to Holtzmann’s Neutestamentliche Theologie for the fullest exhibit of the 
views of recent (especially German) writers on each subject. 


56 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


sity that he should suffer, of which he had spoken, in a 
new light. ‘“Behoved it not the Christ to suffer these 
things and to enter into his glory ?” (Lk. xxiv. 26). And 
now that they have caught sight of the idea that even the 
catastrophe which they dreaded and deplored had a place 
in the purpose of Providence, that which les next to hand 
is to search the Scriptures and see if death has a place in 
the prophetic picture of the Messiah. Jesus is said him- 
self to have set them upon this course of explanation (Lk. 
xxiv. 27, 44-46); but the early chapters of Acts contain 
the one particular account which we possess of the way in 
which they developed this scriptural argument. 

In the earlier discourses the death of Jesus is represented 
as a great crime on the part of the Jews. God, however, 
thwarted their purpose to destroy him by raising him from 
the dead. But even the sins of men may be made to ac- 
complish the divine designs. Messiah’s death, though a 
crime when viewed from the side of the human motives 
which prompted it, was, from the divine point of view, 
according to “ the determinate counsel and foreknowledge 
of God” (Acts ii. 23). Next emerge in this preaching 
traces of the application to Jesus of the picture of the 
suffering Servant (Acts iv. 27; viii. 32-35). This deserip- 
tion was not applied to the Messiah by the Jews of our 
Lord’s time,! and our Gospels amply attest a fact which we 
know from other sources, that the idea of a suffering Mes- 
siah was abhorrent to the Jewish mind. But the “ logic of 
events” had opened the way for the Christians to a new 
view of the nature and method of Messiah’s work. 
Christ’s own words about the fate which should befall him 
had suggested the necessity of this new explanation, and 
the resurrection had made it possible for the disciples to 
receive and develop it. And now when they opened the 
Scriptures and found there the portrait of a Sufferer who 
gives his life for others, all that had happened emerged 
into a new light. With the popular Jewish conception 
of the availability for others of the benefits arising from 
the sufferings of righteous men, the first disciples were 


1 See Schiirer, Jewish People, Div. I. vol. ii. pp. 184-187. 


THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 57 


familiar. If, then, the great men of Israel have suffered 
vicariously, why not the Messiah? In this way the very 
event — Messiah’s death — which to the Jewish mind re- 
futed Jesus’ claim, came to be, for the believing commu- 
nity, the bulwark of their faith, and so the cross became 
the symbol and the glory of the Christian cause. 

The early chapters of Acts, then, show us that the first 
disciples had attained the clear conviction that Messiah’s 
death was a necessary part of his divinely appointed ex- 
perience. They had not only adjusted their minds to the 
fact of his death, but had found how to justify its ne- 
cessity from Scripture. The sayings of Jesus about his 
life given as a ransom for many and his blood shed for 
many, the picture of the Servant suffering for others, and 
the current conceptions of the vicarious sufferings of the 
righteous, all conspired to the conclusion that he died to 
save men from their sins. But when we ask: In what 
way? How did they conceive of his death as availing for 
this end ?— it is not easy to find an answer. Certain it is 
that these discourses do not represent Messiah’s death asa 
satisfaction for sin, or as, in any sense, a substitute for sin’s 
penalty. The phrases in the description of the suffering 
Servant which would most naturally lend themselves to the 
expression of such ideas are not quoted, such as: “ The 
Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all;” “ His soul 
is made a guilt offering for sin.” The most definite state- 
ments which we have are these: God sent his holy Servant 
to bless men in turning them away from their iniquities 
(Acts ili. 26) ; God has exalted Jesus to his right hand 
to give repentance and remission of sins (v. 31) ; every 
one who believes on him shall receive remission of sins 
(x. 43). In another place Christ’s suffering is appealed 
to as a reason why men should repent that their sins may 
be blotted out (iii. 18,19). In no case, in these discourses, 
is the death of Christ represented as the ground of forgive- 
ness. The one condition of salvation which is specified is 
repentance. The death is described as a motive to re- 
pentance and a means of turning men away from sin, but 
its saving value is not more closely defined. The exalta- 


\ 


58 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


tion is emphasized as strongly as the death in these pas- 
sages, and repentance is quite as much the consequence of 
both as is remission. Christ is exalted to give repentance 
and remission ; he suffered that men might be led to 
repent in order to obtain remission (vy. 31; iii. 18, 19). 

When, therefore, turning back to Paul’s statement in 
1 Cor. xv. 3, we ask: In what sense did the primi- 
tive disciples believe that “ Christ died for our sins” ? 
we find no materials which furnish a clear answer. 
Paul could hardly have meant that his own philosophy of 
the subject had been defined and held from the beginning. _ 
The data in our possession would give no warrant for such 
a claim, if, indeed, they could be reconciled with it. It is 
only by a large use of conjecture that we can reconstruct 
the primitive Christian views of the saving significance of 
Messiah’s death. The argument which would show that 
in Christ’s teaching, and in the apprehension of the first 
believers, the death was viewed as satisfying the divine 
wrath against sin and so laying a basis for forgiveness, 
must rest, primarily, upon a strict construction of the 
word Avtpov. It may appeal to the phrase reported by 
Matthew, “for the forgiveness of sins,” but (assuming 
its genuineness) the early discourses in Acts furnish no 
warrant for the judicial interpretation. Certain as it is 
that the first Christians clothed the death of Christ with 
saving significance, it seems to me equally certain that 
they did not associate with it ideas of substitution or 
of penalty. This meaning is found in the few relevant 
words and phrases in the Synoptics and the Acts only by 
improbable interpretations, and by reading back into them ~ 
the concepts afterward wrought out by Paul and by later 
ecclesiastical theology. This is a conclusion to which the 
known facts which bear upon it seem to me to lead. It is 
evident, however, that this conclusion cannot determine 
our estimate of later developments. 

In Paul we first find the elements of a philosophy of 
the death of Christ and of its relation to the salvation of 
men based upon an analysis of the divine attributes. 
This interpretation is reared upon Jesus’ words about his 


THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 59 


death being necessary on men’s behalf, upon the primitive 
apostolic idea that it was included in the divine purpose, 
and upon the conception of vicarious suffering and merit 
which was found in Isa. lii, and which had been devel- 
oped in later Jewish thought.1 Paul’s answer to the 
question, Why does the death of Jesus possess saving 
value ? is, in its substance, that by it he has satisfied the 
divine wrath against sin so that it need not now be asserted 
in the punishment of sinners. In Paul the death of Christ 
is the primary saving deed. It was for the direct purpose 
of dying in order to atone for the sins of mankind that he 
came into the world. 

What is the apostle’s justification of this view? Be- 
tween God and sinful man there is a mutual hostility. 
Sinners are the objects of God's enmity (Rom. yv. 10; xi. 
28)? and they, in turn, are hostile to God (Rom. viii. 7; 
Col. i. 21). Hence any reconciliation, catadXayH, which 
is accomplished between them must be two-sided. Not 
only must man renounce his hostility to God, but God 
must change his attitude toward man — must relinquish 


1 On the idea of the vicarious sufferings of the righteous as elaborated 
in late Judaism, see Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums, p. 181 sq.; 
Dalman, Jesaja 53 das Prophetenwort vom Siihnleiden des Heilsmittlers, 
especially ch. ii; Weber, Jiidische Theologie, chs. xix and xx. I pub- 
lished a translation and condensation of these chapters of Weber’s work 
in The Old and New Testament Student (now The Biblical World) for 
July and August, 1889. Weber’s sources are, for the most part, later 
than the New Testament period, but they illustrate the development of 
an idea which must have had a long history. Illustrations may be found 
in 2 Mac. vii. 88: ‘‘I pray that, for me and my brethren, the wrath of 
the Almighty may cease, which has justly gone forth upon our whole race”’; 
4 Mac. vi. 28: ‘‘Be gracious to thy people; let the punishment which 
we endure on their account suffice thee. Let my blood serve for them 
as a purification; take my life as a reparation for their life.’’ Cf. i. 11; 
xvii. 20-22; xviii. 4; 4 Ezra viii. 26 sq. According to Josephus, An- 
tiquities, I. xiii. 3, Abraham expects that the undeserved suffering of 
Isaac, when he shall have been offered as a sacrifice, will redound to his 
advantage. : 

2 Jn both these cases éx@pol (enemies) is passive, as the context shows. 
In the first it is explanatory of the state of being objects of God’s wrath 
referred to in the previous verse ; in the second it is the contrast of beloved 
(of God), dyarnrof; the correlation is: objects of wrath (enemies) — 
objects of gracious favor (beloved). 


—-* 


60 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


his wrath and resentment. Now God himself undertakes © 
to accomplish, in and through Christ, this twofold recon- 
ciliation (2 Cor. v. 18,19; Col. i. 20,21; Eph. ii. 16). 
He originates and man receives the offer and the gift of 
reconciliation. Through the death of Christ, God opens 
the way for man to enter into a new relation to himself. 
Instead of the former relation of mutual hostility, a new 
relation kas become possible — that of favor, instead of 
wrath, on God’s part, and that of obedience, instead of 
rebellion, on man’s part. In view of what Christ has done, 
God ceases to reckon the sins of men to their account 
(2 Cor. v.19). Since by his death the divine righteousness, 
which is the principle of penalty, has been adequately 
expressed and the divine displeasure against sin amply 
vindicated, God may now restrain the operation of his 
wrath against sinners and open the way to their accept- 
ance and forgiveness. Christ was “made sin” on man’s 
account (2 Cor. v. 21), that is, he so came under the 
action of the divine wrath against sin, so experienced 
the consequences of sin, that God’s justice is thereby 
vindicated and satisfied. 

The view maintained by Ritschl! and some other theo- 
logians, that the righteousness of God which Christ ex- 
presses by his death (Rom. iii. 25), means, in Paul’s 
view, God’s gracious purpose of salvation, seems to me 
to be exegetically untenable. Paul’s idea of the right- 
eousness of God, in this passage, appears to me to be 
that of self-affirming, governmental justice. Its action 
as depicted in passages like Rom. ii. 5-10, 16; 2 Cor. 
v. 10; 2 Thess. ii. 6-8, illustrates the same general con- 
ception. The connection of thought in which “the ex- 
hibition of his righteousness” is set is decisive against 
the interpretation in question. This manifestation of 
righteousness in Christ’s death is set over against a seem- 
ing laxity in God’s treatment of sin in past times. Now, 
however, by the shedding of Christ’s blood, his hostility 
to sin is so expressed and vindicated that it need not be 
further satisfied in punishment. These thoughts proceed 


1 Rechtfert. u. Versdhn. I. § 15. 


THE PAULINE DOCTRINE ROL 
upon the supposition that God can only forgive on the con- 
dition that the judicial reaction of his nature against sin 
has been asserted as fully as it would have been in the 
punishment of sin. It is true that Paul never writes: 
Christ has reconciled God to us, but that is not because 
he does not conceive of the death of Christ as founding 
a new relation of God toward men. (It may well have 
been because Paul is always eager to bring out the fact 
that it is God who originates the Smee The 
statement in question would not have emphasized that 
idea, and might even have seemed inconsistent with it. 
’ Nevertheless it does represent an element of the Pauline 
thought. It might be expressed by saying, God has, 
by the death of Christ, provided a way for reconciling 
himself to the sinful world.t 

Let us note more particularly the significance which is 
attached to the shedding of Christ’s blood. In his vio- 
lent death, says the apostle, he was set forth before the 
world as an ‘AaotTnypiov, which most naturally means either 
a propitiatery offering (se. @iua), or, more generally, a 
means of expiation. The view of Ritschl, Cremer, and 
others, that ‘AacTHplov is here used as in Heb. ix. 5 and 
the Septuagint, to denote the kapporeth, or mercy-seat 
of the ark of the covenant, is, to my mind, quite improb- 


able.2 If that meaning had been intended, the word would 
ee ee 

1 Commenting on Paul’s use of the word idacr7jpioy in Rom. iii. 25, 
Professor Sanday writes: ‘‘ When we ask, who is propitiated? the 
answer can only be ‘God.’ Nor is it possible to separate this propitia- 
tion from the death of the Son.’’ Comm. on Romans, p. 91. Whether 
this idea, which (if genuinely Pauline) meets us in no other biblical writer, 
is congruous with the teaching of Jesus, or available for Christian theol- 
ogy, is a question which, for the present, remains open. 

2 Deissmann in his Bibelstudien, p. 121 sq. (Eng. trans., p. 124 sq.), has 
reénforced the argument against this explanation of the word. He shows 
that it is not accurate to represent the word itacr7piov as the equivalent 
of kapporeth in the Septuagint. The strict equivalent of kapporeth is 
iNaoTHp.ov érldeua. Now it is true that the noun often falls away and the 
adjective is used substantively to represent kapporeth ; but in such cases 
a theological word is simply used as a periphrasis or gloss upon the mean- 
ing of the cover of the ark. It signifies, quite generically, a propitiatory 
article. From the equation of words (Wortgleichung) it is entirely un- 
warranted to conclude to an equation of ideas (Begriffsgleichung). 


62 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


have required the article, and perhaps juav.1_ Moreover, 
the meaning which Ritschl deduces: the manifestation- 
place of the divine mercy, does not suit the connection 
of ideas. Christ is set forth as an ‘Aaornpiov in the 
shedding of his blood in order to exhibit the divine 
righteousness, which demonstration was necessary to 
show that God was not lax in his treatment of sin, as 
might seem to be the case from his passing over sins 
committed in earlier times. The etymological meaning 
of the word is: a means of rendering favorable ((Adoxeo- 
Oar) expiatorium, Siihnemittel, and that is the only mean- 
ing which suits the context here. Other passages confirm 
this view. Men are justified and saved from wrath by the 
shedding of Christ’s blood (Rom. v. 9); his giving of his 
life is regarded as the payment of the price by which 
men’s release from sin is purchased (1 Cor. vi. 20; vii. 23; 
Gal. iii. 13; iv. 5). Whatever “ransom” and “covenant 
offering” may have meant originally, there is no doubt 
that we have here the idea of satisfaction by substitution. 
Paul has not, however, expounded this conception in terms 
of the sacrificial system to any such an extent as might 
have been expected. It has been possible for some 
interpreters to maintain, with considerable plausibility, 
that he did not regard the death of Christ as a sacrifice.? 
Ritschl, on the contrary, reads the whole Pauline doctrine 
in terms of the sacrificial system, but so explains these terms 
as to give quite a new interpretation of Paul’s teaching. 
His exclusion from the sacrifices of any reference to sin 
and its forgiveness yields a view of Paul’s doctrine which 
makes it mean that in Christ God is persistently pursuing 
his eternal purpose of grace. But whatever the sacri- 
fices may have meant, this was not what Paul thought to 
be the sole or immediate import of Christ’s death. It 
appears to me that in his language we may note so many 
traces of Jewish sacrificial ideas that we must suppose that 
this system supplied to his mind suggestive illustrations 


1 Of. 1 Cor. v. 7: 1d rdoxa judy érbOn Xpicrds. 
2So Pfleiderer, Paulinismus, p. 144; W. H. Ward, Bib. Sac. 1894, 
p. 328 sq. 


9 


THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 63 


of certain aspects of Christ’s work. We hear such echoes 
of sacrificial language as the following: “ He gave himself 
up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odour 
of a sweet smell” (Eph. v. 2); ‘Our passover also hath 
been sacrificed, even Christ” (1 Cor. vy. 7). In other pas- 
sages he is spoken of as delivered up to death, — language 
which suggests the offering up of a sacrifice (Rom. viii. 
32; Gal. ii. 20). If it were certain that Odpya is to be 
supplied with (Aaornpiov in Rom. iii. 25, and @vatav 
with zept awaptias in Rom. viii. 3, then these pas- 
sages would be additional illustrations; but these are 
doubtful interpolations. We can only say that while 
Paul has made a less frequent and explicit use of sacri- 
ficial ideas than we should have expected, it is clear that 
the system supplied one of the forms of thought by which 
he interpreted Christ’s death, and, further, that, so far as 
Christ was thought of as a sacrifice, he was conceived as 
substituted for the sinner in death. If he has not espe- 
cially brought out this idea in connection with his allu- 
sions to sacrifice, he has done so in other ways, and the 
inference that this was his conception of Christ’s death, 
viewed as a sacrifice, is quite inevitable. I cannot doubt 
that for the mind of Paul the shedding of Christ’s blood 
relates his death directly to the sacrificial circle of 
ideas. 

In~Gal. iii. 13 we have a reference to the death of 
Christ in which special emphasis is placed upon the in- 
strument of death, namely, the cross, “ Christ redeemed 
us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for 
us ; for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on 
a tree.”” Here the allusion is to Deut. xxi. 23, where it is 
said that the body of a criminal who has been executed on 
a gibbet shall not be left exposed overnight lest the land 
be defiled, because a body so put to death is accursed of 
God and therefore a source of pollution. Now Paul uses 
this idea of the curse connected with the cross as a means 
of relating the death of Christ to the divine law. The 
law declares a crucified one accursed ; therefore in dying 
on a cross Christ endured a curse, or, as Paul realistically 

’ 





64 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


expresses it, “became a curse on our behalf,” and by 
enduring the curse which the law pronounces upon trans- 
gressors (iii. 10), has delivered us from liability to the 
same. The closest analogue to this passage is 2 Cor. 
v. 21, where Christ is said to have been ‘made to be sin 
on our behalf in order that we might become the right- 
eousness of God in him.” The meaning is that he was 
put in the place of sinners; that in his death he so 
endured the penalty of sin, or the equivalent of that 
penalty, that its infliction may be withheld from those who 
will accept the benefits of this substitutionary experience. 
The wages of sin is death; Christ on man’s behalf has 
vicariously endured death, —and in that ignominious form 
of it which in the law involves a curse, —and now that 
the penalty has been paid, the demands of the law are 
satisfied and the way to forgiveness opened. 

We have here essentially the same mode of thought as 
in the passages in which the death of Christ is correlated 
with the justice or wrath of God. The law is contemplated 
as the codification of those demands which arise out of the 
holy nature of God. The verdict of the law has been pro- 
claimed against sin. If this sin is to escape punishment, 
it must do so because some other way is found of mani- 
festing the divine displeasure and of satisfying the law’s 
demand for its punishment. This way God himself pro- 
vides in the vicarious endurance of death by Christ. The 
premisses of this argument are unmistakable, and the con- 
clusion is as inevitable as it is clear. To Paul’s mind there 
is, in the nature of God, an obstacle to forgiveness which can 
never be overcome until sin has been virtually punished. 
The law’s curse impends over man until it is inflicted and 
endured. But Paul stops short of a conclusion to which 
this course of argument seems to be carrying him. He 
does not say that Christ was personally accursed or that 
he endured exactly what sinners would have endured in 
punishment. This conclusion would have been a reductio 
ad absurdum, for Christ was sinless and could not be 
punished. Paul evidently regarded his death as the 
equivalent of punishment in that it expressed the divine 


THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 65 


righteousness and satisfied the law as fully as punishment 
would have done. Hence Christ was “ made sin,” not a 
“sinner”; he was regarded or treated as a sinner in so 
far as he was taking the sinner’s place in suffering. Paul 
says that he became “a curse,” not that he endured “ the 
curse of the law”; that is, he had the experience of one 
accursed, but did not suffer the personal displeasure of 
God. Paul’s argument undoubtedly carries him to the 
very verge of the view that Christ suffered the precise 
penalty of sin —a conclusion which later dogmatic thought 
felt compelled to draw from his premisses; but he care- 
fully avoids it, since it would be fatal to his doctrine of 
Christ’s person. Were Christ’s sufferings, then, in Paul’s 
view, penal? The answer depends upon the definition of 
“penal.” In the strict sense of the word, they were not. 
Penal means, having the character of punishment. Now 
punishment implies guilt, and Christ was guiltless. But 
Paul did regard Christ’s sufferings as serving the ends of 
punishment and as a substitute for the punishment of the 
world’s sin. In his sufferings God manifested and vindi- 
cated his holy displeasure against sin as adequately as he 
would have done by its punishment. It would not mis- 
represent Paul’s thought to say that he regarded Christ’s 
sufferings as representatively penal or as involving penal 
consequences. He took the sinner’s place and endured 
his lot, namely, death. This vicarious experience meets 
the moral ends of punishment ; but it is evident that, since 
he was sinless, his sufferings could not have the moral 
qualities of punishment for him, nor could God entertain 
revengeful feeling toward him personally. Paul’s theol- 
ogy was juridical. God must secure the satisfaction of his 
law before he can forgive. The operation of grace is con- 
ditioned upon the assertion of justice. And yet these 
contrasts are really transcended in Paul’s own thought, 
since it is God himself who, in his love, finds a way to be 
both just and gracious. It is he, and not another, who 
provides the satisfaction. In the last analysis, God re- 
moves his own obstacles and appeases his own wrath. 
The very death by which his righteousness is exhibited is 


x 


66 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


provided for by his love.! Christ’s death could never 
have been a propitiation for men’s sins except by the prior 
determination of God’s love. ‘God commendeth his love 
to us in that Christ died for us.” 

But this legalist scheme which Paul wrought out of the 
materials of current Jewish thought is not the whole of 
his doctrine of salvation through Christ. In the fertile 
mind of the apostle his judicial and substitutionary theory 
has broken over its natural boundaries and has developed 
and expanded in various directions. ‘To his thought the 
vicarious sufferer was not isolated from those on whose 
behalf he suffered; he was in closest connection with 
them as their representative and head. Paul applies this 
conception of solidarity to Christ in representing him as 
the second Adam (Rom. vy. 15-19; 1 Cor. xv. 45; 2 Cor. 
v. 14,15). He summed up, as it were, in himself all man- 
kind considered as the subject of redemption. Hence, in 
his death, all died (2 Cor. v. 14). The substitutionary 
idea underlies the expression; Christ vicariously died the 
death of all; but, nevertheless, a new element enters with 
the identification of mankind with him in his death. It 
is the germ of the thought, which is a favorite one with 
Paul, that there is something in the experience of Christ 
which others may share — something which they may re- 
peat in their experience. If to Paul’s mind he died to 
vindicate justice and satisfy law, it is also true for him 
that he died for men that they should no longer live unto 
themselves (2 Cor. v.15). We have here a suggestion of 
those more mystical and ethical interpretations which we 
shall have to consider directly. 

We find that Paul also attaches saving significance to 
the resurrection: ‘sFor their sakes he died and rose 
again’? ; he rose on their behalf, that is, for their salvation. 

1 «* Paul interpreted the death of Christ from above, not from beneath. 
An offering is not brought to God which shall convert him from wrath to 
grace —so it had formerly been conceived; but God is the Actor, the 
Offerer, the Reconciler, and the ground of his action is pure love, noth- 
ing else.”?’ Wernle, Die Anfiinge unserer Religion, p. 146. 

22 Cor. v. 15. Here vrép ai’rdv belongs to both participles (d7o- 
Oavéyri kai éyepbévre). 


THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 67 


“He was raised for our justification” (Rom. iy. 25). 
Elsewhere the resurrection is assigned a prominent place 
among the contents of Christian faith (Rom. iv. 25; x. 9; 
1 Cor. xy. 14,15). What was the saving value of the res- 
urrection? Probably they are right who hold that it was 
viewed primarily as the counterpart of the death, as the 
supreme evidence that the redemption wrought by the 
death was complete. It is presented rather as a motive to 
faith than as a basis of salvation. And yet its signifi- 
cance seems to have outrun the limits set by this concep- 
tion. In Rom. viii. 34 it is placed in connection with 
the intercession ; but, of course, it may be held that the 
intercession is conceived as based on an appeal to the 
vicarious death on men’s behalf. In any case the resur- 
rection not only supplies to Paul one of his strongest 
analogical arguments (1 Cor. xv), but furnishes the mould 
in which he lkes best to cast his thought of the moral 
renewal of man. Here again we find a link of con- 
nection between the saving deeds and the ethical aspects 
of salvation. 

Had the sinless holiness of Jesus, his perfect life of obe- 
dience to God’s law, in which Paul strongly believed (2 
Cor. v. 21), no saving value or effect? It is undoubtedly 
assumed that his sinlessness is essential to his vicarious 
suffering. If he had been tainted with guilt, he would 
have been personally deserving of death, and so could not 
have died solely for the sins of others. But no direct use 
is made of his personal holiness in describing his redemp- 
tive work. His one great act of righteousness, which 
Paul magnifies, is his death (Rom. v. 18). His obedience 
is noticed, but it is his obedience unto death (Phil. ii. 8). 
His “active obedience” is quite subordinate in Paul’s 
thought to his “passive obedience.” He appeared in the 
likeness of sinful flesh that he might condemn sin in the 
flesh by suffering for it (Rom. viii. 8); his obedience to 
the law is conceived as having for its end “ that he might 
redeem them which were under the law” (Gal. iv. 4). 
In general, Paul did not greatly concern himself about 
the earthly life of Christ; for his mind the atoning sig- 


68 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


nificance of his death eclipsed all other interests. His 
life was but a prelude to his death? 

But was the work of salvation, then, for Paul wholly a 
matter of judicial substitution and imputation? Is it a 
mere payment of debt and cancellation of guilt by means 
of which men are freed from the curse pronounced against 
sin and delivered from the divine wrath? We must 
answer that such is not the case. Paul has another line 
of thought concerning the work of Christ in salvation 
which holds quite as large a place, and is quite as central 
in his teaching as the doctrine of expiation. The relation 
of men to Christ and his salvation is not purely passive.” 
They must enter into close life-union with him so that 
they live in him and he in them. They must die with 
Christ to sin on his cross, and rise with him in newness of 
life. They must complete the full measure of his suffer- 
ings. Believers constitute his mystical body and have 
thus a corporate identity with him, so that his life is, as it 
were, their life. Salvation is not alone from the guilt 
but also from the power of sin. Not only does it deliver 
from the condemnation of the law; it neutralizes the 
effect of the law in calling forth sin into increased activity 
and in weakening the will. The aim of Christ’s death is 
not solely to atone for past sin; it is also to the end that 
men should renounce the selfish life and strive to realize 
the life of love (2 Cor. v.15). Here the love of God, which 
is evinced in the death of Christ, is exhibited as a motive 
prompting to love in return. In this whole passage the 
doctrine of reconciliation by Christ’s death is developed in 


1 The Pauline doctrine of expiation is expounded with substantially 
the same result by scholars of the most various theological tendencies. 
In illustration, I would refer to the following expositions: Cone, Paul, 
the Man, etc., ch. xi; Denney, The Death of Christ, ch. iii; Pfleiderer, 
Paulinismus, ch. iii; Ménégoz, Le Péché et la Redemption d@’aprés St. 
Paul, Pt. I. ch. iii; Holtzmann, Newtest. Theol. Il. pp. 97-121, and 
Cremer, Die paulinische Rechtfertigungslehre, pp. 426-448. All these - 
writers sustain an interpretation with which I substantially agree, though 
I should wish, in some cases, to distinguish very sharply between their 
interpretation and their estimates and inferences. To the elaborate and 
masterly discussion of Holtzmann I acknowledge special indebtedness. 

2 Cf. McGiffert, Apostolic Age, p. 129. 


THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 69 


connection with the ethical import and effect of his saving 
work. In his death all died to sin that they might live 
the new life of love. 

In the Epistle to the Romans the juridical view of 
Christ’s death is developed in chapters iii-v. At the 
beginning of chapter vi an imaginary objection to the 
argument is presented: If, as you seem to say, the more 
sin, the more grace, then would it not follow that we 
should continue in sin that grace may abound? This 
question directs the apostle’s mind to the consideration of 
the ethical aspects and consequences of redemption, and in 
the next three chapters he shows how salvation involves 
union with Christ and consequent freedom from sin and 
victory over it. Christians, in virtue of their relation to 
Christ, must be “ bond-slaves of righteousness” (Rom. vi. 
18), and must live and serve in “newness of the spirit” 
(Rom. vii. 6). Here certainly the salvation wrought by 
Christ is regarded as something more than a mere past 
fact, a payment of old scores ; the death becomes a conquest 
of sin, and the resurrection a triumphant entrance into a 
new ethical life which the believer repeats in his own 
experience (Rom. vi. 4,5; Gal. ii. 19, 20; Col. ii. 20 ; 
ii. 3; Phil. ui. 9, 10). Recipients of the benefits of his 
death are not only freed from guilt and condemnation, but 
from the actual power and effects of sin, and are enabled 
to live a positive life of obedience, service, and holiness. 
Thus “that which from the standpoint of the law and its 
authority appeared as an atonement for the breach of 
bounden duty, appears from the standpoint of the apostle’s 
anthropological premisses as the conquest of the flesh in its 
hostility to God through the divine power of the Spirit.” } 

What, now, is the relation of these two representations 
to each other? Is the subjective-mystical view of sal- 
vation an addition, a supplement, or a transformation of 
the objective-juridical ? Professor Bruce thinks that the 
doctrine of an objective righteousness, wrought out by the 
death of Christ, was first elaborated by the apostle ; that 
this “‘ met the spiritual need of the conversion-crisis,” and 


1 Holtzmann, Neutest. Theol. II. 117. 


70 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


that “the doctrine of subjective righteousness came in due 
season to solve problems arising out of Christian expe- 
rience.” Accordingly, this author speaks of them as “ two 


doctrines,” “two revelations which served different pur- 


poses.” They are not regarded as incompatible or as 
cancelling each other, but as answering two distinct ques- 
tions.! It is common to regard one of these aspects of the 


work of Christ as subordinate to the other. Probably a 


majority of recent scholars hold that the conception of 
freedom from sin through a new moral life is primary in 


the thought of the apostle ;? others reverse this relation.® | 
In this latter view expiation by Christ’s death is the 


major premiss of all Paul’s subsequent argument. Dr. 
Denney holds that all the apostle’s ethico-mystical conclu- 
sions are deduced directly from Christ’s substitutionary 
death. The sole object of his death was to atone for sin ; 
now faith and love and all other Christian graces are the 
consequences of that death in the sense that they are 
evoked as man’s response in gratitude for it. The whole 
experience of salvation is implicit in the believing accept- 
ance of that death as endured for us and as cancelling our 
guilt. Paul’s thought on the subject has but one focus 
and that is Christ’s * finished work,” his “ atonement out- 
side of us.”"* Others describe the two lines of thought as 
parallel or interpenetrating. ‘ With this doctrine” (of 
expiation), says Lipsius, “ which is wrought out in the 
categories of Jewish thought, is imperceptibly mingled 
the ethico-mystical view of the destruction of sin’s domin- 
ion through the putting to death of the flesh.”® Holtz- 
mann says that the principal distinction between them is 
that the ethical view is based upon Hellenistic ideas, espe- 
cially the contrast of flesh and spirit, while the expiatory 
doctrine is built up by the use of popular Jewish concep- 
tions and sacrificial categories.® 

1 St. Paul’s Conception of Christianity, pp. 214, 215. 

2 So, e.g. Beyschlag, N. T. Theol. II. 198-201; Weizsiicker, Das apos- 
tolische Zeitalter, p. 139. 

3 So Pfleiderer, Urchristenthum, p. 229; Ménégoz, op. cit., p. 251 sq. ; 
Denney, Death of Christ, pp. 179-192. 

4 Op. cit., p. 185. ® Dogmatik, p. 510. ® Neutest. Theol. II. 117. 


THE PAULINE DOCTRINE as 


The fact that such differences of opinion exist among 
the most competent interpreters, is sufficient proof of the 
difficulty of defining the relations of these two lines of 
thought. The apostle has not united them in such a way 
as to show in what consisted their unity or connection for 
his own mind. Whether they are really one, or really 
two, and, if the latter, what their bond of connection is, 
are questions which admit of only conjectural answers. 
To me, however, it seems quite unlikely that the two 
classes of representations in question could have expressed, 
for Paul’s own mind, two separate doctrines. The fact 
that they are developed independently in the Epistle to 
the Romans is doubtless due to the nature and purpose of 
the argument; elsewhere they are asserted and unfolded 
together. And yet I must admit that the impression 
received by most interpreters of a certain duality of view 
—a judicial and an ethical method of approach to the 
subject of Christ’s death —is not wholly without justifi- 
cation. It is possible, of course, to contend that the two 
classes of propositions: Christ died to manifest the divine 
righteousness, to satisfy the divine displeasure against sin, 
and: Christ died that men might not live unto themselves, 
that men might die with him to sin on his cross and rise 
with him to newness of life — it is possible, I say, to con- 
tend that these two classes of statements mean the same, 
and so to interpret them as to make them practically 
identical in idea. The fact remains, however, that on 
most minds they make a very different impression. 
Holtzmann offers the very interesting suggestion that the 
objective-juridical theory is (as we have observed) the pre- 
cipitate of the current Jewish ideas of substitution and 
expiation applied to Christ’s death, while the ethico-mys- 
tical view is the more direct product of Paul’s own expe- 
rience. We are reminded that his own salvation is chiefly 
described in terms of the latter? an experience which 
he generalizes in his favorite teaching that all Christians 
died with Christ and rose with him.? But it is question- 


1 Cf. my Theology of the New Testament. p. 429. 
2 See, e.g. Gal. ii. 19-21. 3 Neutest. Theol. Il. 117, 118. 


72 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


able if we can separate between his experience and that 
Jewish thought-world which had supplied the very atmos- 
phere of his mental and religious life. With his concep- 
tion of God’s nature and God’s law, Christ’s satisfaction 
for sin must have been a primary fact in his experience. 
Still, the suggestion is a valuable one. It is unquestion- 
ably true that the juridical elements of Paul’s theology, 
as seen in his doctrines of expiation and justification, are 
survivals of his Pharisaic training. ‘They determined, in 
fact, the form of his religious experience as really as they 
did the course of his thought. But the question is a fair 
one, how far they were essential to his religious life and 
thinking. It is certainly a suggestive fact that Paul’s 
juridical arguments are brought forward most prominently 
—one may say, almost exclusively—in his polemic 
against Judaizing errors and objections to the gospel. 
His constructive development of the doctrine of salvation 
is chiefly in such terms as death to sin and union with 
Christ. His own salvation is described as an ethical 
process. 

Traditional dogmatic has taken over the juridical 
aspects of Paul’s teaching and has elaborated, and even 
exaggerated, them into a system of substitutions, imputa- 
tions, and equivalences which to most modern minds seems 
so artificial and repellent that many are inclined to repudi- 
ate all views which pass under the name of atonement. 
But whether one approve or disapprove, it is a fact that 
the traditional doctrine of salvation has been constructed 
primarily out of the survivals of Pharisaism in Paul’s 
thought. This has been done with a certain onesided- 
ness, with a strong, if unconscious, preference for Juda- 
istic terms and ideas, but with a logical cogeney which 
was more than a match for methods and efforts which 
sought by mere exegesis to disprove the legitimate deri- 
vation from Paul of this result. How plain it is that the 
question, what we shall derive from Paul, is the question, 
what estimate we shall put upon the various elements of 
his thought. The ancient theologies made their dis- 
criminations and estimates as really as modern thought 


-T 
Ww 


THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 


ever does. They took what they wanted from the great 
quarry and left the rest. 

Let us note an example germane to our present subject. 
The theory that there were in God two sets of contrasted 
moral attributes, summarized under the names justice and 
love, the former of which was primary, was not without a 
certain apparent justification in Pauline ideas. One may 
plausibly argue that the Epistle to the Romans opens with 
the picture of these two contrasted qualities in God stand- 
ing over against each other, and that the justice or the 
wrath is primary, since the problem is, How may 
justice be satisfied, in order that mercy may operate ? 
Here are modes of thought which were current in late 
Judaism, and it is evident that they still retain a strong 
hold on the apostle’s mind. They are now taken up by 
later thought and developed to their logical consequences ; 
a conflict between mercy and justice was imminent in the 
bosom of Deity. Justice demanded satisfaction ; it would 
have its vengeance upon sin. Mercy yearned to save 
men, but was powerless. Just then Christ came for- 
ward and bowed his head to the penal stroke. Justice 
is now appeased and the obstacle to the operation of 
mercy removed. This scheme is deduced from the two- 
fold assumption of a conflict between justice and love 
in God and of the primary rights of justice in the case.! 
Is it Pauline? Yes, if everything is Pauline the germ or 
suggestion of which may be found in Paul; if every trace 
of Pharisaism, every survival of the late Jewish thought- 
world in which he was reared is to be regarded as funda- 
mental to his conception of the gospel. But one thing 
was overlooked in this argument, namely, how Paul had 
himself transcended his own contrast of love and justice 
in his Christian conviction that it was the divine love 
alone which found a way to satisfy justice, and that the 
seeming contrast thus dissolves, after all, into unity. 
Grace is the source of the whole redemptive procedure. 


1The theory is elaborated in Shedd’s Theological Essays, p. 265 sq., 
and Dogmatic Theology, passim, and in Strong’s Philosophy and Reli- 
gion, p. 188 sq., and Systematic Theology, passim. 


i4 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


While in the direct exposition of the process of expia- 
tion, justice is described as if holding a certain primacy, 
yet in Paul’s general view, taken as a whole, it is plain 
that love is the logical prius of the very idea and possi- 
bility of expiation. The death of Christ has its motive 
and ground in the love of God (Rom. y. 8). Ifattention be 
fixed solely on one of the special circles of Paul’s thought, 
I grant that the scheme which has been sketched may be 
deduced from him; but if regard be had to his philosophy 
of salvation as a whole, it is plain that he does not regard 
Christ’s death as rendering possible the operation of love, 
and that he does not regard retributive justice as primary 
in the nature of God. If justice demands satisfaction, love 
provides the way in which the satisfaction is made. “ The 
element of grace,” says Baur, “is so predominant (in Paul’s 
teaching) that everything which the divine righteousness 
demands in the death of Jesus can itself only be considered 
as a consequence of the divine grace.” 4 

We shall hereafter recur to the points which are here 
suggested. Let me, however, state in advance that the 
materials of Paul’s Epistles should not be used, in my 
opinion, as they are too often used, with no professed 
discrimination of the sources of his various arguments 
and illustrations, and with no consideration of what is 
primary and what secondary in his system of thought. 
Paul was the most versatile and many-sided thinker of 
the apostolic age; his writings are a veritable treasure- 
house of Christian thought, but it must be admitted that 
if his language and modes of argument have been legiti- 
mately employed by traditional dogmatics, then he is 
chiefly responsible for a method and scheme of thinking 
regarding God and the world whose acceptance for the 
modern mind is impossible. The men of to-day can no more 
think in terms of late Jewish theology than they can think 
in terms of pre-Socratic philosophy. They can no more 
appropriate the outward forms of Paul’s Jewish thought 
respecting expiation than they can adopt the cosmology or 
demonology which he derived from the same source. 


1 Paulus, Il. 167, 


a 


THE PAULINE DOCTRINE 5 


No scholar of our time ever thinks of adopting the 
allegorical method of interpreting the Old Testament 
because Paul, having learned that method in the Jewish 
schools, has employed it in some of his arguments. The 
apostle’s great Christian convictions are obviously dis- 
tinguishable from such methods of illustrating or justify- 
ing them as were incidental to his Pharisaic training. In 
like manner, in general, it is not only legitimate, but nec- 
essary, to distinguish — difficult as it may sometimes be to 
do so— between the specifically Christian and the char- 
acteristically Jewish or rabbinic in Paul. This is done, in 
one way or another, by all thoughtful students, though 
some might not readily admit the fact. Now, since, in 
some form, this discrimination is made, and must be made, 
by all students of the subject, why is it not in every way 
better that it should be made frankly and critically, in the 
light of the best attainable historical knowledge of the 
apostle’s education and thought-world? 

It is well-nigh universally admitted, and is practically 
assumed even where it is theoretically denied, that we 
must distinguish Paul’s “ gospel,” his Christian doctrine 
of grace and faith, from the allegorical exegesis and 
Pharisaic modes of thought by which, not infrequently, 
he seeks to illustrate and enforce it. The same principle 
holds good in application to our subject. Behind the 
juridical apparatus of justification and expiation which 
was taken over from his Jewish inheritance and training, 
we must seek those essential ethical truths which consti- 
tute the substance of his Christian faith and teaching. 
Here, too, his own word is applicable, ‘We have this 
treasure in earthen vessels.” There can be no greater 
mistake than to confound the treasure with the vehicles 
of illustration and argument which were supplied by a 
rabbinic education. 


CHAPTER V 
THE DOCTRINE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 


UNLIKE the Epistles of Paul, this Epistle presents the 
doctrine of salvation chiefly in terms of sacrifice. Now 
Christ is a priest, now an offering; his blood is the blood 
of a sacrificial victim shed to procure the forgiveness of 
sins. Subjectively considered, salvation is pardon, cleans- 
ing from sin, the purification of the conscience. Al- 
though there are many important points of contact 
between Paulinism and our Epistle, yet the differences 
are more marked than the resemblances. For Paul, as 
we have seen, the death of Christ was due to a necessity 
springing out of the requirements of the divine righteous- 
ness ; it was necessary as a satisfaction to God’s law; 
Christ’s death was substituted for the death which sin 
deserved. This circle of ideas is absent from the Epistle 
to the Hebrews. Here Christ is a pure offering, offered 
in sacrifice to God, but his death is not viewed as a sub- 
stitutionary expiation. The absence of this idea is the 
more remarkable since the author so closely approximates 
it: Had he shared this conception it is not easy to see 
why he did not bring it forward in connection with such 
assertions as that Christ made propitiation (iAdoxecOar) 
for the sins of the people (ii. 17), tasted death for every 
man (ii. 9), and was offered to bear away the sins of many 
(ix. 28). He, too, assigns reasons for the necessity of 
Christ’s death, but they are not Paul’s reasons. Not the 
satisfaction of the law, the removal of the curse, the 
endurance of the penalty of sin, but a divine fitness or 
decorum is assigned as the reason why the author of sal- 
vation should be made perfect through sufferings (ii. 10). 


1 See Ménégoz, La Théologie de V’Epitre aux Hébreux, p. 181 sq. 
76 


_ 


THE DOCTRINE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 77 


Elsewhere he deduces the necessity of Jesus’ death from 
the very fact that he is a priest. It is the calling of a 
priest to offer sacrifice; hence, “this high priest must 
also have somewhat to offer” (viii. 3), and that ‘“some- 
what” can only be his own life. In another place this 
necessity is derived from the import of the word &aOy«n. 
This word has two meanings, — covenant and testament. 
Our author passes from one meaning to the other in the 
elaboration of hisargument. The first covenant was sealed 
by a death ; in fact, wherever a testament, or will, goes into 
_effect, it does so in consequence of a death ; therefore it was 
needful that the establishment of the New Covenant should 
be ratified by a death, that is, the death of Christ. How 
widely different is this from Paul’s juristic argument. 

It lies outside our present purpose to discuss the rela- 
tion of our Epistle to contemporary thought.! It must 
suffice to say that we have in it an acute and profound 
exposition of Christianity, on a general Pauline basis, in 
the spirit and method of the Alexandrian exegesis and 
philosophy of religion. The influence of Philo on the 
author’s thought and language is especially marked. The 
relation of the Old Testament system to the New is con- 
ceived to be that of shadow to reality, of promise to fulfil- 
ment. The earlier covenant belongs to this lower, sensible 
world (ix. 11; xi. 3), the realm of types and shadows 
(vill. 5; 1x. 23) which Philo called “the visible order ” ; 
Christ and his salvation belong to the upper, heavenly 
world of eternal reality (will. 1,25; ix. 1,24; x. 1), which 
Philo, in the spirit of Plato’s doctrine of archetypal ideas, 
called the xécpos vontes, the intelligible world. By this 
series of contrasts between higher and lower, shadow and 
substance, temporal and eternal, the author strikingly 
illustrates the superiority of Christianity to Judaism, and 
depicts the absoluteness and finality of the gospel.2. Now 
the underlying idea here noticed has a certain kinship with 
Paul’s teaching on the same subject. For both writers the 

1 This has been done very thoroughly by Ménégoz, op. cit., p. 176 sq., 


and by Holtzmann in his Neutest. Theol. II. 290 sq. 
2 Cf. Denney, The Death of Christ, pp. 207, 208. 


78 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


law is preparatory to the gospel and finds in Christianity 
its fulfilment ; but how differently is the process conceived 
and described! Paul contemplates the law chiefly in its 
ethical demands. It pronounces a curse on all who do 
not obey its every requirement; it is an inexorable 
avenger ; consequently Christ must satisfy the law by his 
death, enduring a curse which was the equivalent of the 
curse pronounced by the law against sin, in order to open 
the way for the exercise of forgiveness. To our author, 
however, the law is a ceremonial system. Its significance 
is that it prefigures the perfect sacrifice which Christ 
makes for sins, and illustrates the lower, earthly counter- 
part of the supersensible, heavenly world into which Christ 
has entered, there to exercise the functions of a perpetual 
priesthood on behalf of his people. ‘The sharp contrast 
between law and grace, so characteristic of Paul, is not 
drawn by our author, and the way in which Paul shows 
how, despite this contrast, the law indirectly serves the 
ends of grace,! is quite foreign to this Epistle. In Paul’s 
view the law increases transgressions by calling out man’s 
native sinfulness into stronger and more manifold expres- 
sion. To this writer the law is simply an ineffective, 
because pictorial and symbolical, system of ritual purifica- 
tion. Hence for Paul, Christ has abolished the law; for 
our author he has fulfilled it. In this matter, as Ménégoz 
says, the writer of Hebrews is an evolutionist, while Paul 
is a revolutionist. These differences are quite natural, 
since the word “ law” is used by the two writers in such 
widely differing meanings. 

Other differences are equally striking. In Hebrews 
the death of Christ, viewed under the aspect of a sacrifice, 
receives an almost exclusive attention. The resurrection 
is as incidental to our author’s scheme of thought as the 
category of sacrifice is to Paul’s. The contrasts of letter 
and spirit and of flesh and spirit, which are so significant for 
Paul’s doctrine of salvation, scarcely appear in Hebrews, 
and do not appear at all in the Pauline sense. The 
heavenly intercession of Christ, his perpetual exercise of 


1See my Theology of the New Testament, pp. 371, 372, 


THE DOCTRINE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 79 


priestly functions on our behalf, takes the place of impor- 
tance which in Paul is occupied by the expiatory aspect of 
his death. Paul, also, has the idea of intercession, but it is 
chiefly the intercession of the Spirit of which he speaks, 
and the conception is neither developed at length nor pre- 
sented in terms of the Levitical ritual. Probably the near- 
est doctrinal counterpart in Paul to the idea of Christ’s 
eternal priesthood in Hebrews is the conception of life- 
union with the risen and glorified Christ. But of that 
whole circle of Pauline ideas which centres in the phrase 
év Xpiot@, there is scarcely a trace in Hebrews. Even 
more than in Paul is the work of salvation a work done 
“ outside of us” on our behalf. We have seen how Paul 
supplements this conception by his ethical mysticism. His 
doctrine on the juristic side is: Christ for us ; but when 
he describes salvation as an actual experience, his chief 
emphasis is upon Christ im us, a mutual indwelling of 
Christ and the believer. This idea is not developed in 
our Epistle. Its nearest counterpart is the teaching that 
since Christ has entered into the most holy place, the 
immediate presence of God, and there ministers on our 
behalf, we may freely draw nigh to God with full assurance 
and may rest secure in his favor (x. 22). But in its form, 
at least, this teaching resembles more a leaf from Paul’s 
juristic exposition, such as: “ Being now justified by his 
blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through 
him” (Rom. y. 9), than it does such a description of 
Christian experience as this: “ There is therefore now no 
condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus. For the 
law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free 
from the law of sin and of death” (Rom. viii. 1,2). It is 
quite in accord with the difference here noted that the 
doctrine of the Spirit receives but a very slight develop- 
ment in Hebrews. Our author does, indeed, speak fre- 
quently of an inner cleansing, a purification of the heart 
G. 3; ix. 14; x. 22), but this is conceived to have been 
wrought by the death of Christ, on the analogy of the 
Levitical sacrifices (ix. 22, 23). If the blood of those 


1 Rom, viii. 26, 27; cf. v. 34, 


offerings avails for a ritual cleansing, how much more shall 
the blood of Christ cleanse the conscience (ix. 13, 14). 

This brief general comparison of the type of thought 
illustrated in Hebrews with that found in Paul may serve 
to indicate the special peculiarities of our author’s exposi- 
tion and to aid our apprehension of the new ideas which — 
he brought to bear upon the subject. Other points will © 
come to view as we proceed. Let us now undertake a ~ 
systematic exhibition of this remarkable treatise on Christ 
and his salvation. It will be convenient to divide the 
general subject into the following themes: (1) the person ~ 
of the High Priest ; (2) his offering of himself, conceived 
in a threefold form (a) as a sin offering, (6) as a covenant 
offering, and (¢) as the offering of the great Atonement- 
day ; (3) his heavenly intercession ; (4) the effect of his 
sacrifice; and (5) the faith required in the recipients of his 
benefits. 

On the historical side the picture of Jesus in our Epistle 
has important points of contact with the Synoptic por- 
trayal of his earthly life. He is described as partaking 
in our human lot, as obedient, tempted, and suffering, as 
learning obedience by his sufferings, and as typically 
illustrating the trust of a true Son of God in his Father 
(ii. 10, 14,18; iv. 15; v. 8; vi. 2S 

On the metaphysical side, however, our author’s con- 
ception of Christ is more akin to that of Paul. With 
formal differences we have here the Pauline doctrine of 
Christ’s descent into our world from a preéxistent state. 
It was he who established the house of Israel in which 
Moses served (iii. 3), and in the latter’s preference 
for God’s service he was enduring “the reproach of 
Christ” (xi. 26). Through his agency, or codperation, 
God made the worlds, and from the beginning he was 
appointed heir of all things (i. 2). For a little while, 
indeed, did God subject him to humiliation and suffering 
that he might make atonement for human sin, but there- 
upon exalted him again to a throne of glory and honor 
Cis sO, EE: 

But it is chiefly in the character and functions of a priest 


80 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 
A 


THE DOCTRINE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 81 


that Christ is described. After the description of his su- 
periority to the angels (chs. i, 11) and to Moses (ch. iii), 
he is introduced in this character and compared with the 
priests of the Levitical system. This comparison covers 
a number of points in all of which his superiority to them 
is shown. Theirs is a changing and temporary order; his 
is an eternal priesthood. They must offer sacrifices for 
their own sins, as well as for those of the people; he is 
a holy, guiltless, and undefiled High Priest who has 
no need to make a sacrifice for his own sins, and who can 
therefore all the more effectively atone for those of others. 
They minister in this lower earthly sanctuary which is 
but a semblance or shadow of the true tabernacle; he 
exercises his priesthood in heaven itself, appearing there 

perpetually in the presence of God on our behalf. They are 
_the representatives of a perishing order which is even now 
on the point of vanishing away: he belongs to a world of 
abiding reality, and is connected with a covenant which 
is changeless and eternal. Their ministrations can only 
ceremonially cleanse; they cannot really take away sins ; 
his sacrifice has in it the power of moral renewal; it 
cleanses the conscience and imparts ability to do the divine 
will (v. 3; vii. 3, 11, 12, 16, 24, 26-28; viii. 5-13; ix. 
11-15; x. 1-18). 

One of the author’s methods of illustrating the eternal, 
supramundane character of Christ’s priesthood is to de- 
scribe him, quite in the manner of Philo, as a priest “ after 
the order of Melchizedek” (vii. 17). This mysterious 
priest-king appears for a brief moment on the stage of 
Old Testament history and then vanishes from view (Gen. 
xiv. 18-20). He meets Abraham as he is returning home 
with the spoils of war, pronounces a blessing upon him, 
receives a tithe of the spoil—and that is all. Unlike 
other priests, nothing is said of his pedigree or history. 
His coming and his disappearance are alike enveloped in 
mystery. He simply stands forth in his priestly character, 
inentire isolation. So far as known, he derived his priest- 
hood from no other. For all that history can tell us of 
his office, he is “ without father, without mother, without 


82 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of 


life” (vii. 3). But his very mysteriousness makes him a 
fit type of our great High Priest. His name means * king 
of righteousness,” and the name of his residence, Salem, 
means “peace.” The fact that Abraham paid tithes to 
him evinces his dignity and proves his superiority to the 
Levitical priests, for in Abraham’s paying tithes it may be 
said that Levi, the head of the priestly tribe, being yet in 
the loins of his ancestor, paid tithes also to this mysterious 
priest-king, and by so doing acknowledged his superiority 
(vii. 5-10). 

Christ, then, is a priest of this higher order, whose office 
is not dependent upon descent from a single tribe, but 
possesses a direct, divine authority and an inherent and 
changeless worth and effectiveness. But now the very 
idea of a priest is that he should offer sacrifices, hence 


Christ must have somewhat to offer (viii. 3), and this © 


offering must be as much more perfect and efficacious than 
the Levitical sacrifices as his priesthood is superior to the 
order of Aaron. Beyond this point of view our author 
does not appear to have gone in his reflections upon the 
necessity of Christ’s death. <A priest must offer sacrificial 
blood ; where sacrifices are, there must occur the death of 
the victim. Christ is a priest, and of this superior order 
and character; he must therefore offer a sacrifice which 
comports with the nature of his office; the blood of that 
sacrifice can only be his own, offered by means of “an 
eternal spirit ” (ix. 14), the spirit of eternal love and self- 
giving. We are thus brought to a more particular con- 
sideration of the offering which Christ made. 

This is the central theme of the Epistle (viii. Ll). The 
doctrine of Christ’s sacrifice is the “solid food for full- 
grown men” (y. 14), which the author wishes his readers 
might receive, and which stands in contrast with such 
rudiments of Christian doctrine as repentance, faith, and 
baptism (vi. 1, 2). In what way the sacrifices in general 
operate, or how that of Christ in particular atones for sin, 
the author does not say. He assumes the common Jewish 
point of view respecting the efficacy of sacrifice. It is 


THE DOCTRINE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 83 


the divinely appointed means of approach to God and of 
reconciliation with him. For our author this is axiomatic, 
and he does not attempt to go behind or beneath it. As 
has been indicated, he draws his illustrations from three 
parts or elements of the Levitical system : the ritual of the 
sin offering, of the covenant offering, and of the offering 
on the great Day of Atonement, although he does not 
formally distinguish them or attach to them any different 
significance. They all alike atone, and Christ is the anti- 
typical counterpart of each and all of them. The axiom 
which underlies the whole argument is that “apart from 
a shedding of blood forgiveness does not take place” 
(ix. 22). Whether this proposition is meant in an abso- 
lute sense, or is intended as the statement of a fact of the 
Levitical system, is a question which probably carries us 
beyond the author’s point of view. For him the Mosaic 
law was an expression, in types and shadows, of the ab- 
solute will of God. He assumed the divine origin and 
necessity of bloody sacrifices in Judaism and, accordingly, 
it was self-evident to him that in the antitypical system 
there must be a corresponding offering made. 

The most obvious consequence of the axiom just noticed 
is that Christ’s death was a sin offering. He has offered 
one final sacrifice for sins (x. 12, 18), in virtue of which 
men may freely draw near to God in confident trust, and 
through which their inner lives may be cleansed and per- 
fected (x. 1, 22). Contemplated as the sacrificing priest, 
he has “made propitiation (iAdoxec@ar) for the sins of the 
_ people” (ii. 17); contemplated as the victim, he was 
“offered once for all (&ra£&) to bear (aveveyxeiv) the sins 
of many” (ix. 28). The proper meaning of (AdcKec@ar 
is “to render favorable” (fAews), and this is its import 
in heathen literature; but it is a noticeable fact that the 
biblical writers avoid the direct use of the expression, 
“to conciliate God.” This verb occurs but twice in the 
New Testament: in the publican’s prayer (Lk. xviii. 13), 
in the passive, “God be propitiated, be merciful, to me 
the sinner”; and in our passage, where the object of the 
action is not a person but the sins of men. This is a 


84 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


modified Alexandrian use of the word in which it can no 
longer mean * to render propitious or favorable,” but must 
mean, in general, “ to atone for,” “to expiate.”” What re- 
lation this action bears to the nature and, specifically, to 
the retributive nature of God, this loose use of (Adoxec Oat 
is too vague to indicate. If the Pauline philosophy of re- 
demption be regarded as lying behind the phrase in ques- 
tion, then the meaning would be, Christ by his death 
appeased the divine wrath against sin and thus removed 
the obstacle in the divine mind to its forgiveness.1 But 
there is a large element of inference in this interpretation. 
It seems very doubtful, not only on account of the indefi- 
niteness of the terms, but in view of the fact that the au- 
thor never comments on the modus operandi of death in 
sacrifice, or introduces the Pauline idea of a penal equiv- 
alence. In the view of some we have an echo of Paul’s 
doctrine in the phrase, “to bear (that is, to bear the 
penalty of) the sins of many,” but the Septuagint usage 
strongly favors the conclusion that aveveyxety here means 
to bear away.2 These passages assert the efficacy of 
Christ’s sacrificial death for the putting away of sin, but 
I can find no philosophy of the fact in our Epistle. The 
conviction appears to rest upon the general assumption 
respecting the divine authority and necessity of sacrifice 
as a medium of approach to God. 

It is a favorite thought with our author that the Chris- 
tian system is a New Covenant. Now the Sinaitic cove- 
nant was ratified by a solemn sacrifice, ‘and Moses took 
the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Be- 
hold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made 
with you concerning all these words” (Ex. xxiy. 8). 
This covenant sacrifice furnishes another point of analogy 
between the animal offerings and the death of Christ. 
The blood of the “mediator of the new covenant” is a 
“blood of sprinkling” (xii. 24), whereby the hearts of 
men are “sprinkled from an evil conscience” (x. 22); 


1 Holtzmann thinks this meaning is implicit in the phrase which there- 
fore contains the ‘‘ Kern des Siihnebegriffs,”’ op. cit., II. 300. 
2 Of. abérnos THs auaprlas, ix. 26, 


THE DOCTRINE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 89 


that is, his blood is the sign and seal of a new covenant 
relation with God into which men may now freely enter. 
It is in this connection of ideas that our author deduces 
from the double meaning of dia8y«n the twofold argu- 
ment for the necessity of his death, already noticed. The 
first covenant was sealed by a death, and every testament 
becomes operative only through a death; hence in both 
points of view the new system required to be based upon 
adeath. But this death must be of a higher order and 
greater effectiveness than those which were known to the 
former covenant. The mere pictures or semblances of the 
heavenly realities, the instruments and accompaniments 
of the ceremonial worship, might, indeed, be cleansed by 
the blood of calves and goats, but the antitypes of 
these lower things, the heavenly localities themselves, 
must be purified by the blood of a better sacrifice (ix. 
15-23). 

The ritual of the annual great Day of Atonement fur- 
nished another point of connection between the death of 
Christ and the sacrificial system. The offerings of that day 
had a comprehensive character and significance, and served 
as an atonement and purification for the sanctuary, the 
priesthood, and the nation asa whole. On that day the high 
priest, having made a sacrifice for the sins of himself and his 
family, entered into the most holy place and sprinkled the 
merey-seat with the blood of the prescribed offerings, thus 
“making remembrance of sins every year” (x. 3) and ac- 
complishing an atonement for them.? This sacrificial order 
was “a parable for the time now present” (ix. 9). As 
the high priest entered the symbolical holy place, so Christ 
has now entered into the true inner sanctuary, “ heaven 


1 Of a sprinkling of ‘‘ the copies of the heavenly things ’’ (for example, 
the book of the covenant), on which the analogy of ix. 23 is founded, no 
mention is made in the Old Testament account of the covenant sacrifice. 
Analogous sprinklings, however, are referred to elsewhere, e.g. Num. 
xix. 6, 17; Ley. xiv. 7. The conception of purifying heaven itself by the 
blood of Christ is due to the persistence of the idea of cleansing objects 
by blood under the old covenant. The analogy is pressed to its utmost 
limit. 

2 See Lev. xvi; xxiii, 26-82, 


86 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


itself, there to appear before the face of God for us” (ix. 
24); and as the flesh of the sin offerings must be burned 
without the camp (Ley. xvi. 27), so Jesus suffered 
“without the gate” (xiii. 11,12). But our author dwells 
more upon the differences than upon the resemblances. 
All these ceremonies of the great Atonement-day were 
only symbolical, and therefore morally ineffective. The 
fact that the high priest must make an offering for him- 
self evinced his imperfection. The further fact that he 
alone might enter the holy place showed that the true 
holy of holies, the immediate presence of God, was not yet 
made freely accessible to all who would draw nigh to him. 
It is evident that such imperfect sacrifices, which are only 
“carnal ordinances, imposed until a time of reformation,” 
“cannot, as touching the conscience, make the worshipper 
perfect” (vii. 28; ix. 7-10). This result can only be 
wrought by the perfect sacrifice of Christ, in which he is 
at once perfect priest and perfect offering. This sacrifice 
does not belong to this lower world of mere sensible pic- 
tures, which are really only semblances, but to the upper, 
heavenly world of eternal reality —to the “tabernacle 
not made with hands,” that is to say, to “ heaven itself” 
(ix. 11-24). He has rent the veil, that is, his flesh (x. 20), 
and has thereby opened the way to a free access to God. 
In his sacrifice we have something real, eternal, effective. 
His work cleanses the conscience and renews the heart 
(ix. 14; x. 22). It isa work which is continuous; Christ 
perpetually ministers as a priest on our behalf in heaven. 
The experience of death was, indeed, endured once for all 
here on earth; but this experience does not exhaust for our 
author the meaning of Christ’s offering. The conception 
of two worlds, a higher and a lower, carries the import 
of the great sacrifice up into the world above (viii. 2). 
There Christ is still offering himself, perpetually giving 
his life for men. “So long as we think of death as the 
offering, we can speak only of the efficacy of the death 
stretching forward into the future. As soon as we sub- 
stitute life, the true biblical idea of offering, for death, 
the thought of the life offered (the life of one who dieth 


THE DOCTRINE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 87 


no more) involves in its own nature the element of con- 
tinuousness.” 1 

It is upon this idea of a changeless priesthood, a per- 
petual offering to God through an eternal spirit, that the 
conception of intercession is based. Unlike the Levitical 
priests, who are dying men, our great High Priest abides 
forever and has a priesthood which is unchangeable ; 
“wherefore he is able to save to the uttermost them that 
draw nigh unto God through him, seeing he ever liveth 
to make intercession for them” (vii. 25). It is because 
his office is of this higher character ; because his ministry 
is a part of that archetypal order of which the Mosaic rit- 
ual is only a semblance or shadow, that his priestly min- 
istration possesses this perpetual efficacy. It is because 
Christ entered not into a holy place made with hands, a 
mere pattern of the true sanctuary, but into heaven itself, 
the higher world of abiding reality, that he now “appears 
before the face of God for us” (ix. 24). What relation our 
author conceived to exist between the one great priestly act 
of Christ done once for all, —the yielding up of his life 
on the cross, —and this perpetual, heavenly ministration, 
it is not easy to determine. The motive of the latter idea 
seems not to be the same as in Paul. For him the inter- 
cession of Christ is one element in the manifold security 
of the believer. Expiation, justification, intercession — 
such is the threefold pledge which God has given of his 
love (Rom. viii. 31-35). For our author, however, the 
idea of intercession appears to arise from the inherent 
character of Christ’s priesthood and offering. Since 
these belong to the world of eternal reality, their opera- 
tion must be continuous and perpetual. This intercession 
is clearly conceived to be something more than an appeal 
to a past finished act ; it is not a mere perpetual petition- 
ing, but a perpetual ministration. He is now and always 
a ministering priest in the true tabernacle, the immediate 
presence of God (viii. 2). The method of this priestly 
ministry is not more particularly described, and we can 


1 Milligan, The Theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews, p. 144. Cf. the 
whole discussion in chapter vii. 


88 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


only say that our author has carried out his parallel 
between the lower and the higher orders in application 
to the present subject without attempting to define the 
relation between the current view of a single past sav- 
ing deed and a constant saving activity of Christ on our 
behalf. 

Let us next observe the descriptions given of the effects 
of Christ’s sacrifice. We have already noted that they are 
such as the putting away or bearing away of sins (ix. 26; 
x. 4), the purification of the heart and conscience (i. 3; 
ix. 14), and the sanctification of the people (x. 22). By 
his death he made “purification of sins”; his blood 
“cleanses the conscience from dead works to serve the 
living God”; by his offering he has “ perfected for ever 
them that are sanctified.””. Now these moral effects appear 
to be regarded as the direct and intended results of Christ’s 
saving work. It is possible, indeed, to argue that a ju- 
ridical satisfaction of justice must be inserted between 
Christ’s saving act and these results in order to connect 
them together;! but if so, this was a logical necessity of 
which the author was not aware. He may not have told 
us — and I do not think he has done so — how the sacrifice 
wrought these effects, but certainly he has not intimated 
that it accomplished them indirectly through an endurance 
of the penalty due to sin by which the bestowment of for- 
giveness and the procurement of its results were made pos- 
sible. It seems to me clear that our author assumed as 
axiomatic the efficacy of sacrifice—on what ground he 
does not state. The Old Testament sacrifices sufficed 
for their purpose; they could cleanse the sanctuary, 
purify the flesh, and create a remembrance of sins; that 
is, they sufficed for symbolical and ritualistic purification. 
But for the actual putting away of sins, for the purifying 
of the heart and the renewing of the life, they were inade- 
quate. ‘These results only the blood of Christ can accom- 
plish, and this it can do because of that mysterious inherent 
virtue, that “eternal” quality which it possesses. The 
apparatus of a juristic philosophy of atonement is not only 


1So Denney, The Death of Christ, pp. 229, 230. 


THE DOCTRINE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 89 


wanting here, but is incongruous with the method and 
nature of the author’s thought. The efficacy of Christ’s 
work stands connected, for his mind, with his conception 
of the supersensuous, archetypal world of reality of which it 
isapart. For Paul Christ’s death saves indirectly by pro- 
viding a way of salvation; for our author it saves directly 
through its inherent power to cleanse the life. 

The view of the Christian life presented in our Epistle 
is determined in part by the author’s characteristic modes 
of thought and in part by his special aim in writing. 
Since the doctrine of the high priestly work of Christ is 
the crowning truth of his system, it is natural that accept- 
ance of it and confidence in its efficacy should be strongly 
emphasized. But the Epistle is an Apology for the gos- 
pel, an argument for its superiority in comparison with 
Judaism, designed to dissuade the readers from lapsing 
into the latter. From this point of view the duty which 
is most urged is steadfastness or fidelity. Now salvation, 
considered as an experience, is chiefly described under the 
aspects thus suggested. Hence faith and hope are its two 
chief keynotes. 

Of faith Christ himself is the supreme example. He is 
the “ beginner of our faith” (xi. 2); that is, in the matter 
of steadfast trust in God and perfect obedience to his will 
he has gone before us and shown us the way. ‘The cap- 
tain or leader of our salvation was himself perfected 
through sufferings, passed through a career of moral trial, 
and learned obedience by the hardships which he endured. 
It is the duty of the believer to follow in his steps, to 
exemplify the same unshaken trust in God, the same 
endurance of suffering, the same confidence in the reality 
of invisible, heavenly things as he illustrated. Now our 
leader, having set this perfect example of obedience here 
on earth, has rent the veil which separates earth from 

1“Das Siihnopfer wirkt, mit Ueberspringung der auf jiid. Impu- 
tations- und Satisfactionstheorien zuriickweisenden Mitglieder, direct 
entstindigend. ... Nicht als ein, ausserhalb des siindigenden Menschen 
zwischen Gott und Christus vorgehender, Act erscheint hier die Stihne, 


sondern als Verleihung einer wirksamen Kraft zu realer Heiligung”’ (vii. 
25). Holtzmann, Neutest. Theol. I. 304. 


90 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


heaven ; or, in the author’s favorite terms, having fulfilled 
his priestly office here, has now entered into heaven itself, 
there to continue his mediation on our behalf; it is our privi- 
lege to follow him thither. Our faith is to be like an anchor 
cast into that world beyond and which holds us in secure 
attachment to it. We see how the author’s idea of faith 
is colored by his conception of Christ as our pattern of 
trust and by his Philonic view of the twofold universe, — 
the sensible and the supersensible world. 

What, then, is the nature of faith? It is first formally 
defined and then illustrated in detail. Faith is a firm 
confidence with respect to the objects of hope, an assured 
conviction of the existence of invisible realities (xi. 1). 
Generically considered, faith is belief in a supersensuous 
world. The examples which follow illustrate, in various 
ways, this confidence in the invisible. By faith we believe 
in the creation of the world by the power of God—an 
event lying wholly beyond our observation and experi- 
ence. Abel’s faith lent a superior value to his sacrifice. 
Noah proved himself righteous by his confidence in the 
divine warnings, though they were not reénforced by any 
visible indications. Abraham and Sarah illustrated their 
faith by their belief in the divine assurance, in spite of the 
strong human probability to the contrary —and so on. 
Faith is an heroic trust in God; it is that confidence in 
invisible powers and realities which can “ remove moun- 
tains” of difficulty and improbability. It therefore in- 
cludes obedience, fidelity, and hopefulness. Its motto is, 
“ Let us hold fast the confession of our hope that it waver 
not ; for he is faithful that promised” (x. 23). It is evi- 
dent that this conception of faith is much more general 
and comprehensive than that which is common in Paul. 
For him faith is primarily trust in Christ and life-union 
with him. For our author, also, faith “looks unto Jesus” 
as its great example and inspiration ; but prevailingly it is 
God himself —his promise or his favor — which is repre- 
sented as the object of faith (vi. 2,10; xi.6). Nor is faith 
regarded by our author, as by Paul, as a condition of 
obtaining righteousness ; it is rather the proof of its pos- 


| 


THE DOCTRINE OF THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 91 


session. By offering his sacrifice in faith, Abel had witness 
borne to him that he was righteous (xi. 4). 

The writer’s conception of the heavenly world as the 
seat of all abiding realities and the sphere of Christ’s con- 
tinuous saving work gives to his doctrine of faith a strong 
other-worldly cast. Faith looks away from the reproaches 
and afflictions of this present life, joyfully contemplating 
the loss of all earthly goods, knowing that in heaven there 
awaits the believer a better and a permanent possession 
(x. 34). Here in this lower world of instability and 
change, this realm of shadows and semblances, the Chris- 
tian has no continuing city ; but by faith he is able to hope 
for a permanent abiding-place in the heavenly world, a city 
with eternal foundations, whose builder and maker is God 
(xi. 10,16). This city is the celestial Jerusalem, inhab- 
ited by an innumerable company of angels and of perfected 
men. There the full perfection of the believer will be 
realized and all his longings satisfied. 

The question may be here suggested: What conception 
of Christ’s saving work does this doctrine of faith seem to 
favor? Now Paul’s idea of faith manifestly fits in with 
his scheme of imputation and satisfaction, even though on 
its mystical side it may be regarded as transcending it. 
But this circle of ideas is, as we have seen, absent from 
Hebrews. Faith is a persistent confidence, a steadfast 
adherence. To what? To the belief that a vicarious 
work has been done on our behalf — to an objective saving 
deed, done outside of us? Doubtless; but not that alone. 
Nor is that the aspect of Christ’s work which is kept most 
prominently in view when the author is dwelling on the 
actual experience of salvation. Rather is it the present 
saving action of Christ which is emphasized, while faith is 
described not as looking back to a past saving deed, but 
upward and forward to the world of present eternal 
reality. Salvation is realized in the pursuit and attain- 
ment of sanctification, in participation in the holiness of 
God (xii. 10,14). It is cleansing, consecration, comple- 
tion, after the pattern of Christ. We may not question 
the objective, Godward aspect of Christ’s work; our 


92 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 





writer’s use of the categories of priesthood and sacrifice 
carries that with it. But it seems to me clear that his 
spiritualization of these categories, his description of 
Christ’s sacrifice as a direct power of purification, and 
his emphasis upon faith as, in principle, an imitation of 
Christ, all go to show that his doctrine of salvation has 
quite overleaped the limits of his own Jewish sacrificial 
categories and has shown itself to be in all its deeper 
elements an ethical and spiritual affair. As for Paul his 
own favorite categories of law are too narrow to contain 
his Christian doctrine of salvation, in like manner are 
those of sacrifice, for our author. 


CHAPTER VI 
THE JOHANNINE DOCTRINE 


THE Johannine definition of salvation is “ eternal life,” 
and this life is explained to consist in the knowledge of 
the only true God and of Jesus Christ whom he has sent 
(Jn. xvii. 3). Salvation is realized in the knowledge of 
God and in fellowship with him. It means to walk in 
the light, to keep his commandments, to love as he loves. 
Now it is Christ who has taught us and enabled us so to 
live. He is the Revealer of the Father, who has inter- 
preted to men the Father’s will and nature (Jn. i. 18). 
It is the object of the Prologue of the Gospel to univer- 
salize this idea of Christ’s revealing work. As the eter- 
nally preéxisting agent of God in creation and revelation 
the Logos was the depositary of the divine life and light 
and, like an eternal sun, was shining down into the dark- 
ness of the world’s ignorance and sin, though the world 
in its blindness did not perceive his light. His illumining 
-work on earth in dispensing the Father’s grace and truth 
is but a historical manifestation of a perpetual spiritual 
activity by which he has been seeking to impart a revela- 
tion of God to every individual man. 

This idea of salvation by revelation runs, like an under- 
tone, through the writings under review. “I have given 
you an example,” says Jesus; “do as I have done” (Jn. 
xui. 15); “JI have revealed the Father’s name unto men, 
and will reveal it, in order that his love may dwell in 
them” (Jn. xvii. 6, 26). Hence he is himself the bread 
of life to men. It is by eating his flesh and drinking his 
blood, that is, by an inward appropriation of him, that 
men are saved.!_ The keynote of the First Epistle is the 


1 Jn. vi. 88-40. Of. my Theology of the New Testament, pp. 225-227. 
93 


94 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


imitation of Christ: He that abideth in him must walk as 

he walked (I. ii. 6); the doing of righteousness is the 
proof of divine sonship CI. ii. 29); he whose hope is set 

on Christ will purify himself, even as he is pure C1. iii. 

3); as he gave his life for us, so must we give our lives 

for others (I. iii. 16); as he is, even so are we in this world © 
(I. iv. 17). If we have regard solely to such passages ~ 
as we have reviewed, we should derive from them the 
idea that Jesus saves the world by illumining the world ; — 
that as the bearer of the divine light to men, he banishes 
the darkness of ignorance and error from their minds and 
reveals to them the path of truth and duty. And such zs 
the author’s idea; only it is not, as we shall see, his only ~ 
idea concerning the saving work wrought by Christ. 
These writings are pervaded, at the same time, with the 
conyiction of the necessity and saving value of the death 
of Christ. Let us first note the expressions of this conyic- 
tion in the Gospel. 

We meet the idea in question on the very threshold of 
the Gospel. John the Baptist proclaims the Messiah in ad- 
vance as the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the 
world (Jn. i. 29). The questions most discussed concern- 
ing this passage are these: (1) Is it historical? (2) What 
is the meaning of “the Lamb of God”? (8) Does “take © 
away” mean “to bear away by removing,” or “to take 
away by bearing,” that is, by enduring the consequences, 
or penalty, of sin? The difficulties connected with the 
first question are considerable. In strong contrast to the 

-Synoptics the Fourth Gospel represents the messiahship of 
Jesus as apparent, and even as heralded, from the begin- 
ning of his ministry. In like manner, an intended proph- 
ecy of his death is early introduced (Jn. i. 29). It would 
only be according to analogy to suppose that an idea which, 
as matter of fact, emerged much later, is carried back be- 
hind even the beginning of Jesus’ work.! At any rate, 


1“ Der Taufer wusste gewiss eben so wenig von einem vers6hnenden 
Tode Christi als Paulus vor seiner Bekehrung.’’ O. Holtzmann, Das 
Johannesevangelium, p. 51. Those who maintain, per contra, the his- 
toricity of the words attributed to the Baptist, can hardly do so except 


THE JOHANNINE DOCTRINE 95 


the choice lies between the Johannine construction of 
events and that which the Synoptists present. If Jesus’ 
messiahship was acknowledged and proclaimed from the 
beginning, and the necessity and saving import of his 
death declared even in advance, we must abandon the 
Synoptic version of the course of events.? 

The article in the phrase “the Lamb of God” marks 
the conception as a familiar one—the Lamb of which 
prophecy speaks, or the Lamb of whose death for sin 
Christians are accustomed to speak. The word was al- 
ready in current use before this Gospel was written 
(Rey. v. 12; xiii. 8; 1 Pet. i. 19). Now the term might 
be used in allusion to the Passover Lamb, or to the 
Servant of Yahweh, who is compared to a lamb (ls. 
hii. 7); or the two ideas might be combined in the 
expression. Paul had compared Christ’s death to the 
paschal offering (1 Cor. v. 7), and the picture of the suf- 
fering Servant was familiarly applied to Christ (Mt. viii. 
47; Acts viii. 32-35; 1 Pet. ii. 22-25). While the 
special significance attached in the Old Testament to 
the Passover offering may be regarded as favoring the 
first explanation, it seems to me that the phrase “ Lamb 
of God” makes the allusion to the lamblike Servant of 
God in Isaiah liii. quite indubitable. The New Testa- 
ment use of “the Lamb” as a name for Christ contem- 
plated as a sacrificial victim appears to have primary 
by supposing a special, direct revelation to him. The idea of a suffering 
Messiah was not only foreign, but abhorrent, to the Jewish mind. This 
proclamation was, therefore, without any basis or antecedents in the 
ideas of the Baptist’s time and circle. Meyer is doubtless right in reject- 
ing all efforts at historical explanation (assuming the historicity of the 
saying), and in insisting on a special revelation concerning Jesus’ death 
and its significance as alone adequate to explain the forerunner’s words. 
Comm. in loco. 

1 Cf. Wild, Contentio Veritatis, p. 161: ‘‘ We saw that the words ‘ for 
the forgiveness of sins’ . . . were probably of the nature of a comment 
on the original words. The same may be said of the opening testimony 
of the Baptist in the Gospel of St. John: ‘Behold the Lamb of God, 
which taketh away the sins of the world.’’’ The writer adds that both 
additions were justified, but that later thought erred ‘‘in placing the 


emphasis too exclusively upon the death of Jesus as the means of 
redemption.”’ 


96 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


reference to the picture of the Servant who went as a 
lamb to the slaughter; but with this is certainly com- 
bined associations derived from the Levitical ritual. It. 
is not merely as the meek and quiet sufferer, but as the 
sacrificial offering that Christ experiences death. The 
phrase in question is probably, primarily, a reminiscence 
of Isa. liii. 7, interpreted in the sense which was attached 
to the atoning sacrifices. 

The phrase 6 aipwy almost certainly means, “who 
removes.” The Seventy use other words (AapBavew, dé 
pew, avadéepev) to denote the bearing (enduring) of sin. 
To take away is also the uniform meaning of aipewv in the 
Fourth Gospel.t That this is its meaning in a closely anal- 
ogous passage in the First Epistle (1. ili. 5) is extremely 
probable from the context. It is in connection with an 
argument designed to show the radical antagonism between 
the Christian life and the sinful life that it is said that 
Jesus Christ “ was manifested in order to take away sins,” 
that is, to abolish them or break their power. Such is the 
natural import of the word on its face. It is possible, 
however, that in such connections as that in which it here 
stands, it carried or implied, for the mind of the writer, a 
further meaning such as the figure of the slain lamb is 
adapted to suggest.2, One must judge whether this is 
probable in the light of other expressions. 

The subsequent references to his death in the Gospel 
are almost all included in the sayings of Jesus himself. 
It may be well to grasp them up together that they may 
first be viewed in their entirety. The sayings are these : 
** As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so 
must the Son of man be lifted up; that whosoever believ- 
eth may in him have eternal life” (Jn. iii. 14, 15), with 
which should be compared this saying: “ And I, if I be 
lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself” 
(Jn. xii. 32); “I give my flesh for the life of the world” 
(Jn. vi. 51) ; “the Good Shepherd gives his life for the 

1 Fg. xi. 48; xv.2; xvii. 15; xix. 31. 


2 Of. xix. 36. Holtzmann thinks this likely : ‘‘ Man muss zur Ueber- 
nahme der Siihne fortschreiten.”” Neutest. Theol. IL. 479. 


THE JOHANNINE DOCTRINE 97 


sheep ” (Jn. x. 11); “I lay down my life freely ” (x. 18); 
“Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it 
abideth by itself alone; but if it die, it beareth much 
fruit” (Jn. xii. 24); “Greater love hath no man than 
this that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn. xv. 
13) ; “For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also 
may be sanctified in truth” (Jn. xvii. 19). To these 
sayings should be added the comments of the Evangelist 
himself on the declaration of the high priest Caiaphas, to 
the effect that it was expedient that some one should die 
for the people (Jn. xi. 48-52). In the judgment of 
some interpreters there is also an allusion to Jesus’ death 
in the saying, “God so loved the world, that he gave 
(that is, on this view, gave up to death as a sacrifice) his 
only begotten Son” (Jn. ii. 16), though it is quite 
impossible to determine whether this and the subsequent 
verses (to v. 21) are a part of the discourse of Jesus or 
an explanatory comment of the author. 


ideas in question, then, are these: the lifting up of Christ_ 
Earth cross) that mn ) that men might have life or be drawn _unto 
himself ; his gift of his flesh and_ blood as s the life-giving 
fo 


od =i drink ; his laying d down or consecrating of his 
eambehaliof others. ©. 
- By the lifting up of-Christ from the earth the Evan- 
gelist clearly understands his elevation upon the cross. 
This is not only implied in the comparison with the lifting 
up of the brazen serpent upon a pole, but is explained by 
the comment: “ This he said, signifying by what manner 
of death he should die” (Jn. xii. 33). But it is possible 
that a further meaning lies in the background of this 
explanation. ‘The phrase “from the earth” suggests the 
conception of exaltation to glory and power. The com- 
bination of these two widely differing ideas would not 
seem incongruous to the author since he regards the way 
of humiliation and death as the path to glorification. Via 
erucis, via lucis. In the near prospect of death Jesus sees 
himself as already glorified (Jn. xiii. 31). Paul has a 
similar collocation of ideas when he says that Christ 
humbled himself to the death of the cross and therefore 


— 


98 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


God highly exalted him (Phil. ii. 8, 9). In this view 
the death of Christ, contemplated as the counterpart of 
his exaltation, is a means of salvation, a supremely attrac- 
tive power drawing men to him. I cannot see that any 
expiatory idea is suggested or implied in this representa- 
tion. The passages seem to say that the —— 
Christ and the victory of that love are saving powers 1 
liuman life. It is, of course, open to the interpreter to 
declare that they cannot be such except by a satisfaction 
to God’s justice, which is the logical prius of love’s work 
in salvation, but it is incumbent upon him to show that 
such is the case. 

The second group of passages to be considered is found 
in connection with the discourse on the bread of life, 
especially the words: ‘The bread which I will give is my 
flesh, for the life of the world”; “* Except ye eat the flesh 
of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in 
yourselves”; “ He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my 
blood abideth in me, and I in him” (Jn. vi. 51, 53, 56). 
The common view is that we have here references to 
Jesus’ submission to death for the salvation of the world, 
that is, to his making an atonement by his death for human 
sins. Some see in the words allusions to the Lord’s Supper, 
in which, however, the expiatory idea is involved. The 
verses quoted, if taken by themselves, do most naturally 
carry one’s thoughts in this direction, and the correspond- 
ing interpretation is certainly plausible. When the dis- 
course is regarded as a whole, however, this explanation 
does not seem to me so natural. The course of events (be- 
ginning with v. 1) which lead up to the discourse does not 
favor either the sacramental or the sacrificial interpretation. 
Jesus is illustrating his present life-giving work in healing 
and in quickening the spiritually dead. The miracle of 
the loaves is set in the same connection of ideas. This 
outward act of feeding suggests the motive of the deserip- 


tion of himself as the bearer of spiritual food to mankind, 
which is elaborated under the ficure of the Bread of life. 
Moreover, he is represented as addressing in this discourse 
his enemies and critics. Is it natural to suppose that in 


————————— eer CC 


THE JOHANNINE DOCTRINE 99 
i 

such circumstances he would introduce a description of 
his future sacrificial death or a reference to a Christian 
memorial sacrament to be established later? Such a sup- 
position seems to me in the highest degree unnatural. It 
should be added that, in keeping with the descriptions 
which lead up to the discourse, the language refers chiefly 
to a present bestowment of life, “* My Father is (now) 
giving you (déwovv) the true bread out of heaven” (Jn. 
vi. 32). Jesus was speaking of a salvation which he was 
offering to men then and there —a present, available 
bread of life. It is true that in verse 51 we have the 
future tense, “The bread which I will give (dé#c) is my 
flesh.” In order to obtain the sacrificial interpretation 
of these words, two assumptions have to be made: (1) that 
the verb d:dcvar here means to give to God as an offering, 
and (2) that by the future tense a definite future event 
(Christ’s death) must be meant. Both assumptions are 
questionable. The verb &ddvae is used throughout (vv. 
31-34) of giving food for man’s nourishment, and the 
future tense may quite naturally denote Christ’s continuous 
giving of himself for the life of the world. “He who 
eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in 
him,” says Jesus. 

It seems to me that the discourse is designed and 
adapted to convey, in figurative terms, the idea of a 


jritual appropriation of Christ. This is the conception 
of HS Tmport which Sait the circumstances which lead up 
to it and agrees with the natural meaning of the phrase, 
to eat the bread of life. Moreover, Dr. John Lightfoot 
has given abundant examples of the use of this figure in 
the Jewish schools. In the light of this usage his con- 
clusion as to the meaning of the discourse under consider- 
ation is this, “To partake of the Messiah truly is to 
partake of himself, his pure nature, his righteousness, his 
spirit; and to live and grow and receive nourishment 
from that participation of him — things which the Jewish 
schools heard little of, did not believe, did not think ; but 
things which our blessed Saviour expresseth lively and 
comprehensively enough, by that of eating his flesh and 


100 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


drinking his blood.”! It is indeed possible, as Weiss 
suggests, that in reproducing the discourse, tradition as- 
signed to some of its terms a sacrificial meaning or viewed 
its language as specially applicable to the eucharist. If 
so, it can only be said that this application does not seem 
warranted by the circumstances, the occasion, or the lan- 


guage of the teaching taken as a whole. The dominant . 


idea is that of ethical appropriation. I think that all its 
expressions are compatible with this idea. But if it be 
insisted that the references to eating the flesh and drink- 
ing the blood of the Son of man must refer either to 
Christ’s death or to the eucharist, the most natural con- 
clusion from that assumption would be that this is an 
application which was given to the discourse in the com- 
position or redaction of the narrative. Neither the situa- 
tion presupposed, nor the figure used, nor the obviously 
mystical language which is prevailingly employed, lends 
itself naturally to either of the more common interpreta- 
tions. 

We turn next to those passages which speak of our 
Lord’s giving his life or consecrating himself on behalf of 
(érép) others. As the Good Shepherd he “lays down his 
life for the sheep” (Jn. x. 11,15). The selfish proposal of 
Caiaphas to sacrifice Jesus in order to avert suspicion from 
the ruling classes is viewed by our author as an uncon- 
scious prophecy of the necessity of Christ’s death. Un- 
wittingly “he prophesied that Jesus should die for the 
nation; and not for the nation only, but that he might 
also gather together into one the children of God that are 
scattered abroad” (Jn. xi. 51, 52). In his great love he 
“lays down his life for his friends” (Jn. xv. 13). For 
his disciples’ sakes he “ sanctifies or devotes himself that 
they themselves also may be sanctified in truth” (Jn. xvii. 
19). To these passages which express the idea of the gift 
of himself on behalf of others may be added the striking 
figurative generalization of this truth, “ Except a grain of 

1 Hore Hebraice, in loco, Oxford ed., III. 309. This general concep- 


tion of the purpose of the discourse is entertained, with variations in the 
applications of its meaning, by Westcott, Weiss, and Wendt, 


ie Ee 


| THE JOHANNINE DOCTRINE 101 


_ wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone; 
| but if it die, it beareth much fruit” (Jn. xii. 24). 

Now the special points of interest for our present inquiry 

e: What is the import of the phrase, * to lay down his 
life for” others (1eOévar tHv yruynv iép)?1 What is the 
meaning of his “sanctification” (a@yafev) of himself for 
_ (érép) his disciples that they may be sanctified? Do 
: these representations, taken together, point in the direc- 
: 


tion of a substitutionary death, having judicial or penal 
significance, or do they rather favor the idea of an absolute 
consecration of his life to the service of others which 
eee ee ene © Wied ie night 1 lead ? 
Some interpreters find the expiatory idea in the phrase, 
“to lay down his life for” others. It is held to mean, to 
pay down his life as a ransom-price for the redemption of 
others. It is noticeable, however, that the support for 
this interpretation is drawn from the classical use of the 
phrase or from biblical sources outside the Johannine 
writings, such as: “Christ Jesus who gave himself a 
ransom (0 dovs éavrov avtidutpov) for all” in 1 Tim. ii. 6, 
and the Synoptic phrase “to give his life a ransom for 
many ” (dodvar THY Wuyny AUTpoV avTi TOA) (Mk. x. 45 
= Mt. xx. 28), which is assumed to bear a judicial sense. 
But this method of determining the force of the phrase is 
certainly questionable. We cannot properly assume that 
because a similar expression in 1 Tim. carries a certain 
meaning, therefore that meaning attaches to this Johannine 
phrase. In point of fact this phrase is an idiom of the 
Johannine writings, and is to be explained from their 
characteristic use of words. As tOévar Ta (watia is the 
correlative of AawBavav Ta iwatia (Jn. xiii. 4, 12), so is 
7iOévar THY ~ruynv the correlative of XauwBavav thy Woyny 
(Jn. x. 17,18). His giving of his life is the counterpart 
of his taking or receiving it again, as in the Synoptics: 
He that giveth, or loseth, his life shall save it. The fol- 
lowing are the other principal examples of its use: “ Peter 
says, I will lay down my life for thee” (Jn. xiii. 37, 38) ; 
1 Cf. the kindred idea of his giving his flesh for the life of the world — 
dtdbvar THY capka avtod bwép THs TOU Kécuou fwiHs. — Jn. Vi. 51. 


102 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


“Hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for 
us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren ” 
(I. iii. 16). Inthe frequent instances where te@évar is not 
followed by tv yvynv, but by other objects, the meaning is 
generally “to lay away, or aside,” for example: “ Where 
have ye laid him?” “ He layeth aside his garments.”? Now, 
these Johannine uses of the word 71@évat do not favor the 
idea that in the passages under consideration its meaning 
is, to pay down asa ransom. ‘There certainly could have 
been no such thought in Peter’s mind, or in the minds of 
those who heard him, when he said, “I will lay down my 
life for Jesus’ sake.” Nor is it conceivable that the author 
cduld have had such an idea when he compared the giving 
of life by Christians for each other to Christ’s giving of 


—- KL 


his life for them. It would be unnatural in the last 


degree to attach a wholly different meaning to the same 
words in the two clauses of the same sentence. Jesus’ 
laying down of his life for men must have been, for our 
author, of such a nature that men could, in some degree, 
imitate and copy it. He could not have conceived of it as 
generically different from the self-giving of Christians 
in mutual love and service. For these reasons most 
modern scholars reject the traditional rendering “ to pay 
as a ransom” in fayor of the meaning, “to yield, give, 
or bestow.” , 

We consider next the meaning of the words: “For 
their sakes I sanctify myself,” etc. (adyaf@ ewavtov) (Jn. 
xvii. 19). Its general import cannot be doubtful. As 
the Father sanctified him and sent him into the world 
(Jn. x. 36), that is, consecrated him to his saving office 
and mission, so also he freely consecrates himself to this 
work with all that it involves. But do the words include 
a direct and intended reference to his death, and, if so, do 
they intimate or suggest anything respecting the saving 
import of that death? The traditional interpretation 
answers both these questions in the affirmative. In this 
view, the meaning is, I consecrate myself in death as an 
expiatory sacrifice unto God. This explanation is forti- 


1 Jn, xi. 34; xiii. 4, of, xix. 41; xx. 2, 18, 15. 


| 


| THE JOHANNINE DOCTRINE 103 


fied by reference to a sacrificial use of ayafev, which is 
found in the Septuagint.1. Now we cannot doubt that 
Jesus’ consecration of himself to his saving work included 
his devotion of himself to whatever experiences and suf- 
ferings might lie in his path. At the time which this dis- 
course contemplates he saw the cross impending over him 
so that his self-consecration doubtless involved for his 
consciousness the experience of death. But it does not 
- follow from this that these words have direct and specific 

reference to the experience of dying, much less that they 

denote his death as an expiation or a judicial equivalent 
for sin’s penalty. In no other instance does the Johan-. 
nine use of dyafew convey or suggest this interpretation. 
The Father’s sanctification of Jesus in x. 36 is his consecra-: 
tion of him to his messianic office. The sanctification of 
the disciples for which Jesus prays, and which his saving 
work contemplates, is sanctification “in the truth ” (xvii. 
17, 19), that is, consecration to God and to holiness of 
life. The common interpretation requires us to assume 
a double sense for the word “ sanctify” in verse 19 —a 
supposition against which there is, to say the least, an 
antecedent presumption. This difficulty has sometimes been 
met by rendering, I consecrate myself to death in sacrifice 
in order that my disciples may consecrate themselves to 
death as martyrs for my cause. But apart from its un- 
naturalness and the large element of importation in this 
interpretation, a single self-consistent meaning for ayaé- 
ev is not thereby secured, since there is a wide difference 
between dying as a substitute and dying as a martyr. 
Moreover, in the whole discourse there is no allusion to 
his death, much less to an expiatory interpretation of it, 
unless it is contained in this one use of dyiafo. There 
are, however, several expressions of what he has done, is 
doing, and will do in his saving work. They are these : 
His gift to men of eternal life through the knowledge of 
God and of himself (vv. 2, 3) ; his accomplishment of the 
Father’s will in manifesting his name and glorifying him 
on the earth (wv. 4,6) ; his conveyance of God’s truth to 








1 #H.g. Ex. xiii. 2; Deut. xv. 19. 


104 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 







men (vv. 8, 14) ; his guarding of his own from error an 
sin (v.12); his prayer that the Father will keep the 
bind them to himself and to one another in love, an 
complete in them the work which he has begun (wv. 17 
21-26). 

It is in the midst of this course of thought that our pas- 
sage stands. Jesus is saying that as the Father sent him 
into the world, so he is sending them, and that as he is 
consecrating himself for their good, so they are to be con- 
secrated to God. Have we not a close parallel here, alike 
in form and substance, to this, “ Hereby know we love, 
because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay 
down our lives for the brethren” (I. iii. 16)? It seems 
to me that this Johannine parallel, the context of our pas- 
sage, and the use of dy.afev by our author all favor the 
opinion that we have here “ two conse¢rations of a homo- 
geneous character” (Godet). The conclusion of Holtz- 
mann that here, as in i. 29, the Pauline expiatory theory 
lies in the background! seems to me without proof or 
evidence. Nor is the argument to the effect that the 
present tense (ayafw) excludes the idea that he refers to 
his consecration of his life in general,? a cogent one. The 
tense is perfectly appropriate to express the idea of a con- 
tinuous and not yet completed self-giving. We are told 
that his life was past, and that in speaking in the present 
tense he could not refer to that;* but it is quite certain 
that at the moment of speaking he was not dying. The 
general contention that the author of the Fourth Gospel 
has no idea of the divine love except as illustrated in pro- 
pitiation, and that his language must therefore relate to 
the satisfaction of the divine wrath “ whether he has given 
articulate expression to such a relation or not,” * assumes 
_ the whole case which requires to be proved. For the rea- — 
sons given I can only conclude that the phrase in ques- — 
tion most naturally refers to our Lord’s consecration of — 


1 Hand-Commentar, in loco. 

2 Holtzmann, Neytest. Theol. II, 479; Denney, The Death of Christ, 
p. 269. 

3 So Denney, op. cit., p. 269. 4 Ibid., pp. 268, 276. 


THE JOHANNINE DOCTRINE 105 


himself to his appointed work, which would include what- 
ever that work might involve. In point of fact it included, 


' and he foresaw that it included, his death. But of any 


special interpretation of his death I can find in the pas- 
sage in question no trace. 

The principle of self-giving is stated in a general form 
in the saying, “ Except a grain of wheat fall into the 
earth and die, it abideth by itself alone ; but if it die, it 
beareth much fruit” (Jn. xii. 24). Here, it is said, Jesus 
is speaking specifically of his own death, and makes the 
power of his work directly dependent upon it; as the 
grain of wheat must die in order to bear fruit, so must he. 
Even assuming that this is exactly the sense which the 
words are meant to convey, I find no intimation here of 
the way in which his death yields the fruitage of salvation. 
If it is legitimate to introduce the Pauline idea of propi- 
tiation, or to suppose that it lies in the background of our 
author’s version of the Lord’s words, then, of course, the 
meaning is plain enough: Christ must by his death atone 
for sin before its forgiveness can take place. But in order 
to find all this in such a saying, it should be shown, I 
think, that these ideas are plainly expressed or implied 
in the language elsewhere attributed to Jesus by the au- 
thor, or, at any rate, that they hold an unquestionable 
place in his own thought. Now it is not open to doubt 
that Jesus knew himself to be facing the near prospect of 
death, and that his devotion of himself to his life-work in- 
cluded his submission to that experience. In the sense 
that his own life was included in the law which he here 
states, we may hold that he refers to hisdeath. But I see 
no evidence that the reference is more specific. The verse 
in question seems to be paralleled by the verses which 
immediately follow and to be explained by them. The 
discourse continues: ‘“ He that loveth his life loseth it; 
and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto 
life eternal. If any man serve me, let him follow me,” 
etc. (Jn. xii. 25, 26). Now these immediately following, 
and apparently kindred, words are simply the reproduc- 
tion of the frequent Synoptic saying, “He that loseth his 


106 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


life shall save it.” Does any one suppose that saying to— 


refer specifically to Jesus’ death and even to its propitia-— 


tory character? It is true that later on in the discourse 
(v. 27 sq.) the thought turns directly to the subject of his 


4 


death. If the popular view of the strict unity and cohe- © 


rence of these Johannine discourses be assumed, it may be 


urged that the thoughts which come after must have been — 
in mind throughout. If, then, we make every assumption ~ 
which it seems possible to make, we may find in this say- 

ing an expression of the fact that the law of self-giving — 
would involve his death, and that great saving benefits — 


would result from his submission of himself to that law. 
The claim that it is the death per se which is conceived as 
the source of the benefits seems excessive. It is not the 
death of the wheat which produces the harvest; the death 
or perishing of the grain sown is a step in the process of 
nature whereby the germs of the seed are liberated that 
they may develop into the new product. What the anal- 
ogy yields is naturally this, that Jesus’ death is a neces- 
sary condition of his greatest work and power; that 
through death his work for men is made to end in larger 
life and greater fruitfulness. 

No candid student of the New Testament could wish 
to minimize any evidence which can be found that Jesus 
taught or suggested some specific view of the way in 
which his death procured or conditioned salvation. No 
one who has any historical interest or insight would fail 
to appreciate every item of information which might serve 
to show that Jesus had offered to his disciples a theory or 
philosophy of the relation of his death to the forgiveness 
of sins. It is one of the great embarrassments of New 
Testament study that so little information of this kind 
can be found. It is natural enough that Christian theo- 
logians should make the most of every phrase and word 
which can be so construed as to contribute to a theoretic 
or constructive view of that subject. But our great 
desire for evidence does not warrant us in manufactur- 
ing it. Paul wrought out a definite theory on the sub- 
ject, and the orthodoxy of all ages has been a reproduction, 


| THE JOHANNINE DOCTRINE 107 


_ with variations, of that theory. But, as we have seen, if 
| it is to be found in the Synoptics, it must be discovered 
in one or two phrases. It does not appear in the reports 
of the first apostolic preaching. We find something kin- 
dred to it in Hebrews — but with a wide difference. We 
look with eager interest to see whether we may find it, or 
some approximation to it, in the Fourth Gospel, which is 
later than all the other sources and is preéminently domi- 
nated by a theological interest. Some are able to find a 
full theory of expiation there; I am not, — least of all in 
the sayings about his death ascribed to Jesus. The say- 
ing attributed to John the Baptist is the one which most 
naturally lends itself to the expiatory interpretation. 
But even if this last of the Old Testament prophets had 
anticipated the whole Pauline and ecclesiastical theology, 
we should be, for all that, as far off as ever from knowing 
the relation in which Jesus conceived his death to stand 
to the forgiveness of sins. 

Let us next note the references to the subject in the 
First Epistle. Here the principal relevant passages are: 
“The blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin” 
Ci. i. 7); “If any man sin, we have an Advocate with 
the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the 
propitiation (‘Aacwos) for our sins; and not for ours 
only, but also for the whole world” (I. ii. 1,2); “God 
loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our 
sins” (I. iv. 10). To these may be added the saying 
already noticed, that “he was manifested to take away 
sins” (1. iii. 5), and this, “ Your sins are forgiven for 
his name’s sake” (I. ii. 12). Now whatever the first of 
these passages may presuppose, it is quite clear that it 
describes not a bearing of sin or a judicial cancelling of 
guilt, but an actual deliverance from sin itself. In this 
respect it resembles most closely not those Pauline pas- 
sages which speak of Christ’s being made “sin” and “a 
curse” for us, but the references which we found so 
common in Hebrews, to Christ’s cleansing the inner 
life by his blood,! perfecting the conscience, and putting 


1 Heb. ix. 14, x. 2, xa@apifecv in both instances. 


108 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 






away sins by the sacrifice of himself (Heb. ix. 9, 26; 
x. 10, 14). The reference to Christ as an “ Advocate 
with the Father” ‘also reminds us of the doctrine 
of his eternal priesthood in Hebrews. That an actual 
purification, and not merely a provision for a possible 
forgiveness, is meant in I. i. 7 is further evident from 
the fact that it is a “cleansing” of believers of which the 
author is speaking. This cleansing is dependent upon 
their fulfilling certain conditions described by “ walk- 
ing in the light.” If the Christian readers do thus “ walk 
in the light,” two results will follow: they will have fel- 
lowship with one another, and will be cleansed by the blood 
of Jesus from all sin. 

As has been intimated, it is commonly contended that 
behind this passage, and, indeed, behind all the passages 
which we have been reviewing, there lies the assumption 
of a judicial satisfaction for sin which is viewed as the 
condition precedent of all the actual effects which are 
ascribed to the death or blood of Christ. As we have 
seen, this contention rests rather upon inference than 
upon any indication contained in the passages them- 
selves, or their context. This inference is held, how- 
ever, to receive strong confirmation from the two passages 
in this Epistle, in which Christ is expressly called a pro- 
pitiation, that is, according to a Johannine idiom, a cause 
or means of propitiation. This term (/Aacpos), it is 
held, links the Johannine thought to that of Paul, by 
whom Christ is described as a propitiation (/Aaornpiov) 
in the shedding of his blood (Rom. iii. 25). We have 
seen that it is by no means easy to determine with cer- 
tainty the exact meaning of ‘Aaorypiov in Paul; still, the 
context, in connection with other analogous references, 
seems to me to make the import of it fairly definite 
and plain. Can the same be said of ‘Aacpes in 1 John? 
And does it follow from the occasional use of these 
kindred words by the two writers that the later shared 
the thought-world of the earlier? In any case, we 
shall have to look first at the context of the Johannine 
passages. 





THE JOHANNINE DOCTRINE 109 


Deissmann has shown! in what a variety of meanings 
and applications the word ‘Aacucs and its congeners is 
used in biblical and patristic Greek. The New Testa- 
ment usage is, as we have seen, very limited. We have 
ikactypiov once in Paul so correlated with dais ris 
Sixaocvvns Oeov as to show that it bears a significance 
approximating the classical meaning. In Hebrews the 
same word means the lid of the ark and (Adoxec@ar is 
loosely used in the sense of expiating, having not a person 
for its object, either expressed or implied, but tas duaprias. 
This is the whole body of New Testament usage outside 
our passages. We naturally ask: Does ‘Aacpos here 
bear any specific relation to the righteousness of God or 
the satisfaction of the divine law? Does it refer toa legal 
expiation of guilt, or does it relate rather to a moral cleans- 
ing, a power of purification? The arguments for the for- 
mer view would be drawn from the original force of the 
word and from the analogy of Paul’s usage. We are 
further reminded of the stress which the author lays upon 
the saving significance of the death of Christ: “ His blood 
cleanseth”’; “He laid down his life for us.” Such ex- 
pressions, it is urged, naturally warrant us in centring 
the idea of propitiation upon the death and in saying, 
His death zs the propitiation. It is contended, per contra, 
that the word in question has, in any case, lost its original 
force. It is not even used by Paul in its strict sense of 
rendering favorable. In Hebrews it is even further from 
this meaning. It is claimed (so Deissmann) that, in 
actual usage, it is applied to any votive or sacrificial gift. 
We are further reminded that, in this Epistle, the author 
does not deduce the idea of “ propitiation” from the 
righteousness or wrath of God or from the demands of the 
law, but from the divine love, “‘ Herein is love that God 
sent his Son to be an ‘Aacyos for our sins.” Furthermore, 
this Epistle says nothing, in general, of a juridical cancel- 
lation of guilt, but speaks rather of a cancellation of sin 
’ itself, an actual deliverance from sin’s power. In this view, 
Christ is held to be a “propitiation ” in the sense that his 


1 Zeitschr. fiir neutestamentl. Wissenschaft, Heft 3. 





110 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


blood really “ cleanses from all sin.” Not acquittal on the 
basis of a formal satisfaction, but purification by virtue of 
an actual renewing power is here the keynote. Moreover, 
it is not said that the death of Christ, or the blood of 
Christ specifically, 7s the “ propitiation,” but that Christ 
himself is such. It is Christ in the entirety of his per- 
sonality and power who “was manifested to take away 
sins,” really to undo the work of Satan (1. iii. 8) and to 
establish men in a character resembling the divine love 
and purity. 

Such, in brief, are the arguments on either side. The con- 
siderations which, more and more, seem to me to be decisive 
for the second general view are those which are drawn from 
the determining conceptions of the writings under consid- 
eration, namely, the emphasis on the person as the bearer of 
light and salvation, the definition of salvation in terms of 
actual cleansing, and the correlation of the death of Christ 
with the undoing of sin rather than with the cancellation 
of guilt or the satisfaction of law. While the word (rac- 
wos would naturally incline us to expect a doctrine of 
explation in these writings, it must be said, I think, that 
the direct evidence of its presence is wanting. It is in- 
cumbent on those who insist that it is presupposed and 
implied to show that it is part of the warp and woof of the 
author’s thought ; it is not enough to point out that he 
has some words and phrases in common with Paul, and to 
assume without more ado that the theology of Paul is 
logically involved even if none of its fundamental concep- 
tions come to expression. What the author had in the 
background of his mind I leave it for others to divine and 
elucidate; I can find in his writings no doctrine of a sub- 
stitutionary satisfaction to the law or the wrath of God 
teby the guilt of si cancelled. With even less 
plausibility than in the case of the Synopties is it claimed 
that the Johannine tradition attributes this expiatory view 
of his death to Jesus himself. 





1 Cf. Beyschlag, N. T. Theol. II, 445-450 ; Terry, The Mediation of 
Christ, pp. 85-87. 


CHAPTER VII 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 


IF now we glance backward over the investigations 
which we have pursued, the fact which most forcibly 
strikes our attention is that the biblical doctrine respecting 
the nature of salvation stands forth in clear, strong relief. 
Salvation is recovery from sin to holiness ; it is the life of 
obedience, love, a and service to God; it is sonsbip to God 
_and fellowship with him; in the last analysis, it is God- 
likeness. In this conception all the voices of revelation 
meet and blend. True, the conception comes only grad- 
ually to its full development and expression. In the 
prophets it is complicated with the hope of a national 
deliverance; in the legal system it is accompanied and 
limited by notions of ceremonial purification. till, even 
in Old Testament times this idea of salvation as a right 
personal relation to God maintained and asserted itself. 
Yahweh demanded and would at length secure to himself 
a righteous people. This was the burden of the Baptist’s 
message : Repent and forsake your sins; One is at hand 
who will baptize you with the cleansing Spirit of God. 
But it was Jesus who set this doctrine of salvation in the 
clearest light and showed the way to its realization. Not 
alone in precept and in parable, but in his own character 
and action did he show men what the life of sonship to 
God is. The perfect filial consciousness of Jesus is the 
unclouded mirror in which men see themselves as they 
truly are —alike in their actual_sinfulness and in their 
ties. He represented himself as the way 
to the Father —his person and work as the pattern and 
power of a new life. 

After his departure from earth religious thought and feel- 
ing seized upon this conception of his personal agency in 

111 


oD, THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


salvation and elaborated it in various ways. The problem 
was to see and to show how his work had availed and was 
still availing to bring men to God in love and trust. 
Above all, the question for that time was how his sufferings 
and death, which had been so contrary to the expectations 
of his contemporaries, could serve this end. The point of 
importance to be observed here is that, whatever differences 
the answers given to this question might exhibit, all the 
various types of teaching which are reflected in the New 
Testament substantiaily agreed as to what salvation is. 
There might be different modes of apprehending the rela- 
tion to it of Christ’s death. There might be a variety of 
analogies and illustrations used to set forth its signifi- 
cance. But beneath these differences lay one fundamental 
conception of God, of man, and of Christ’s mediation which 
was common to all. Hence we find that interpreters are 
substantially agreed as to what was the primitive Christian 
conception of salvation ; the chief differences arise when the 
effort is made to determine the views which were taken of 
the method of God in effecting it— more specifically how 
the sufferings and death of Christ stood related to it. 

It should be understood, then, that the differences among 
theological interpreters and thinkers do not concern so 
much the nature of salvation as the method or conditions 
on which it is provided and offered. Different expositors 
have derived different results from the New Testament in 
regard to this latter subject, and, not infrequently, have 
pushed their divergences so far as to involve themselves 
in widely separated views regarding the ethical nature of 
God. Why, it may be asked, have candid and conscien- 
tious interpreters gone so far asunder? Partly, no doubt, 
because of the different presuppositions which they have 
brought to their study, and partly because the subject zs 
variously represented and illustrated in the New Testa- 
ment, and every interpreter may find something there to 
encourage his own favorite mode of thought. The mind 
which thinks in terms of animal sacrifice will find a con- 
genial representation in Hebrews. The thinker of the 
Roman, legal cast will hear his favorite keynote in Paul’s 


SS 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 113 


idea of a satisfaction to law, meeting the ends of penalty, 
while the mystic will find ample material in the same 
apostle’s conception of ethical death to sin on Christ’s 
cross and in John’s doctrine of a “ propitiation” which is 
a moral cleansing provided and wrought by the divine love. 
When, now, one has taken in hand the general subject from 
any one of these points of view, it is natural enough for 
him to find in all the more indefinite texts the ideas which 
are elsewhere made so emphatic. In this way, especially, 
the allusions of Jesus to his death are made to yield what- 
ever an assumed identity with some later form of thought 
requires, and in the same way the general references of the 
primitive apostolic discourses are easily rendered more pre- 
cise. We shall see later how the differing presuppositions 
and procedures to which we here allude have been pushed 
so far as to involve fundamental divergences of view re- 
specting the ethical nature of God. But even these diver- 
gences havenot involved correspondingly radical differences 
regarding the nature of salvation. At any rate, I repeat 
that while there is a variety of modes of thought repre- 
sented in the New Testament regarding what is called the 
problem of atonement, these differences do not involve any 
radical divergence as to the ethical character of God or the 
contents of the idea of salvation. And I would add that 
although the differences among the theories which have 
since prevailed are much greater than those which appear 
in the New Testament, it would be feasible to show that 
underneath these disputes about reconciliation, satisfaction, 
and the like, there is a fairly well defined conception of 
salvation itself concerning which Christian thinkers are 
substantially agreed. 

Let us glance back over the subjects which we have dis- 
cussed and seek to estimate the general results and to see 
in what light they place our subsequent tasks. As was 
intimated at the outset, we cannot obtain material directly 
available for Christian doctrine from the Old Testament, 
though we may derive from that source presumptions as to 
what early Christian doctrine probably was. Our brief 
survey of that field showed us two great religious forces 


114 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


in operation, — prophetism and legalism. The whole effect 
of modern criticism has been to demonstrate the priority 
of the former. The fully developed legal system as it 
lies before us in the Pentateuch is post-exilic. It is proph- 
ecy and not legalism which represents the high-water 
mark of Israel’s religious life. While the law in its cere- 
monial aspects was influential and useful in safeguarding 
the religious and institutional life of the nation, it cannot 
be forgotten that it was the decline of prophecy and the 
ascendency of ritualism which brought on the night of 
legalism in the late Jewish period, and produced the 
scribism and Pharisaism with which we are made fa- 
miliar in the New Testament. The superior character and 
deeper significance which the modern construction of Is- 
rael’s history assigns to prophecy are entirely accordant 
with the attitude and claims of Jesus. He belongs to the 
prophetic rather than to the priestly-erder. He never 
assumed priestly functions or emphasized the importance 
of priestly ministrations. All his explanations of his 


mission wore a prophetic cast. He came to declare and — 
illustrate the divine will, to reveal the Father, to bear 


witness to the truth. 

We are not precluded, however, by such considerations 
from seeking in the ceremonial system adumbrations of 
his truth and points of contact with his mission. In the 
sacrifices there was a periodic “remembrance made of sins” 
which was accordant with Jesus’ saving purpose. His 
whole work in its total effect was designed to deepen the 
sense of sin. There could be no salvation where sin was 
not seen and felt in its real heinousness and blamewor- 
thiness. Whatever the offerings might do to quicken the 
realization of sin was kindred to the aim of Jesus. Such 
conceptions as those of devotion to God, mystie communion 
with him, and self-renunciation for his sake, which were 
more or less distinctly associated with the offering of sac- 
rifices, were germane to the thought and work of Jesus. 
The notion of the sacrifice as an atonement or covering 
for the sins of the offerer supplied an analogue to the work 
of Jesus in doing for men what they could not do for them- 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 115 


selves. His mediation of the grace of God to them might 
very naturally be illustrated by the function of the offering 
as a form of mediation between God and the sinner. The 
question of principal difficulty is whether Jesus, and fol- 
lowing him the early Church, entertained a substitutionary 
and penal conception of the sacrifices, and attributed to 
his death a similar character and significance. Here I can 
only remind the reader how precarious we found the argu- 
ment for the penal concepticn of sacrifice —a fact which, 
to say the least, is adapted to weaken the common assump- 
tion that such an interpretation would be natural, if not 
inevitable, for Jesus. 

When, now, we turn to the twofold tradition of Jesus’ 
own words, — the Synoptic and the Johannine, — we find 
the main stress. of his teaching concerning salvation laid 
upon certain ethical conditions Sehich men must fulfil. If 
they wo would enter into the Kingdom of God, they must cul- 
tivate and maintain, not a comanal but a real moral 
righteousness. They must_love and serve their fellow- 
men ; they must exercise a pity, a sympathy, a generosity 
like that of God himself. In the Johannine version his 
teaching wears a more mystical cast. Men must learn to 
know God and must live in fellowship with him; they 
must belong to the truth, must live as children of ie light 
and of the day, must, dwell in God and God in them. But 
this difference is only formal. In both cases salvation is 
realized in sonship to God, and_Jesus is at once the inter- 
preter of the Father to men and the reyealer of man’s pos- 
sible sonship to him. He is himself the Son of God par 
Eminence ; he lived the perfectly filial life ; he knows God 
as his own Father with a clear, unclouded certainty, and 
his aim is to introduce men into the same relation of son- 
ship. Hence his message to men is: You must be and 
may be true sons of God; I who alone know the Father 
am come to reveal him to you; in me you behold him dis- 
closed and interpreted; receive and follow me, and you 
shall have the rights and privileges of sons of God. 

I do not see how any one can doubt that this message 
is the burden of Jesus’ doctrine of salvation. And yet, we 


116 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


are told that his chief object in coming into the world was 
not to proclaim the gospel of salvation but by dying as a 
sacrifice for sin, to found the possibility of a gospel which 
others might preach.!_ On this view what are we to make 
of the fact that Jesus came heralding the good news of 
the Kingdom of God? What means it that he proclaimed 
the Kingdom as a present reality and bade men enter into 
it? How shall we explain the fact that he everywhere 
announced himself as the Saviour of the men to whom he 
spoke, the bread of life which God was giving to mankind? 
On this view there is no gospel in Jesus’ teaching. His 
ministry is but a prelude to his death by which alone a 
gospel becomes possible. The message of forgiveness is 
not yet provided for, although we hear Jesus himself say- 
ing to men: “Thy sins are forgiven”; “ thy faith hath 
saved thee ; go in peace.” How completely are the pro- 
portions of his teaching distorted by such a view! How 
obvious it is that we have here a dogmatic transformation 
of the gospel history ! 

Jesus did, indeed, — probably late in his ministry, — 
speak of the necessity that his career should end in suffer- 
ing and death. But this experience he correlated with 
his life of service and self-giving, of which he regarded 
these asa part. He came to minister and to give his life; 
out of love he would lay down his life for his friends ; he 
would plant his life, as it were, in the soil_of the v world 
that it might bring forth in others the fruits of love . and 
service. Is this giving of life which springs from love’s 
impulse to serve and bless the mere isolated act of dying? 
And did Jesus conceive this act of dying as a payment of 
a debt to the divine justice whereby was laid the ground 
of a possible forgiveness? If so, how did it happen that 
he was always proclaiming the divine forgiveness? What 
is the reason, then, that he never spoke of his death in 
connection with the divine law or justice or wrath, or 
appled to it any such term as atonement, reconciliation, 
satisfaction, or substitution? Why did he not describe 
himself as a sin offering and his blood as a covering for 


1Dale, The Atonement, p. 46, 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS ial 


the guilt of men before God on the analogy of the piacular® 
sacrifices? But here again we are told that this whole 
scheme of thought is, nevertheless, logically involved and 
even comes to occasional expression, and we are reminded 
of the phrases (in the Synoptic tradition) “ransom for 
many,” and “my blood shed for the remission of sins,” 
and of our Lord’s comparison of his blood to that of the 
covenant sacrifice. Now, the argument continues, since 
these phrases evidently bear a sacrificial and substitutionary 
significance, it is further evident that the same is true of 
such Johannine expressions as “drawing all men to him- 
self from his cross” and “ giving men his flesh to eat and 
his blood to drink ” — all the more obviously because John 
the Baptist heralded him in advance as the (sacrificial) 
Lamb of God, and the author, in his First Epistle, applies 
to him the term “propitiation.” Iwill not repeat what has 
been said in earlier chapters*in reviewing these various 
considerations. One hesitates to question the cogency of 
the argument since it seems to satisfy so many thoughtful 
and candid minds. But I must confess that to me it ap- 
pears to be composed chiefly of a tissue of questionable 
assumptions. The application made of every one of the 
phrases in question is doubtful. The ransom-passage is 
a figure of speech occurring only once. It is not claimed 
that the idea which is deduced from it appears elsewhere 
in the Synoptics. Moreover, the context lends no support 
to the current theological interpretation, but indicates, on 
the contrary, that by the giving of his life of which he spoke, 
Jesus designated the culmination of his career of service. 
The juridical interpretation of the isolated phrase, ‘ for the 
forgiveness of sins,” found only in Matthew, is more plau- 
sible and is not improbably, though not certainly, correct. 
We have seen what difficulties attend the supposition of 
its originality. But such as it is, the evidence drawn 
from this phrase is all the proof which can be derived from 
the Synoptics to the effect that Jesus regarded his death as 
laying a basis for forgiveness. The reader will make his 
own estimate of its sufficiency. 

The case is no stronger in regard to the Fourth Gospel, 


ks THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


despite the fact that it is a relatively late composition 
dominated by a theological interest and supposed to be 
tinged by Pauline influences. Here Jesus’ references to 
his death are more numerous and detailed, but there is not 
one of them that bears a sacrificial character, to say noth- 
ing of suggesting a penal satisfaction. He gives his flesh 
and blood, that is, himself, for the life of the world; as 
the Good Shepherd, he lays down his life in his devotion 
to the welfare of his sheep; he consecrates himself to his 
mission that men may be consecrated to God in truth; in 
his love he gives his life for his friends; from his cross he 
will draw men to himself. The arguments advanced to 
prove that these sayings bear a penal or judicial sense are, 
to my mind, of very doubtful validity. They are derived 
from the exclamation attributed to the Baptist, from 
analogous references to the slain Lamb in the Apocalypse, 
and from the word “ propitiation.” Those who are con- 
vinced by this sort of proof seem to me to be easily sat- 
isfied, and, perhaps, predisposed to be so. When one 
considers that the phrase “Lamb of God” (whatever 
usage it actually reflects) is probably a reminiscence of 
Is. lili, —a passage in which the primitive Christian teach- 
ers saw the Messiah reflected without finding a suggestion 
of penal substitution in it,—and observes the connection of 
ideas in which the Johannine term “ propitiation” is set, 
the argument in question is seen to rest on the most pre- 
carious assumptions. Considerations drawn from the Apoc- 
alypse are relevant only on the supposition that it proceeds 
from the author of the Fourth Gospel, and that its concep- 
tions are available for determining the import of words 
ascribed to Jesus. 

It is true enough that the death of Christ furnished a 
problem with which reflective thought was certain to oc- 
cupy itself. We have examples of such theoretic con- 
structions in the Pauline Epistles and in the Epistle to the 
Hebrews. It may be regarded as surprising that the 
Fourth Gospel furnishes so few indications of any theoretic 
view of the subject. One reason may be found in the 
spiritual and intuitional character of the book and in its 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 119 


preoccupation with other interests. Perhaps no developed 
theory was current in the author’s circle. At any rate, 
he has ascribed to Jesus no teaching regarding his death 
as procuring or conditioning the forgiveness of sins, nor 
do his own ideas of the nature of Christ’s saving work 
make it likely that he cherished any such conception. In 
no case is Christ’s work brought into connection with 
the law or with God’s penal righteousness or wrath. Sin 
is a state of darkness and moral death; Christ is the bearer 
to the world of life and light. 

The traditional view commonly supports itself upon two 
considerations which it is not easy to harmonize. ‘The few 
words contained in the Gospels which can be made to bear 
an expiatory significance are pressed to the utmost limit 
in this direction, and then as if quite conscious of the real 
lack of evidence, the theory argues that this is a theme 
which we could not expect our Lord to elaborate. The 
second consideration, which greatly weakens if it does not 
entirely neutralize the first, is the more cogent. Jesus 
was not a teacher of theological theory. To suppose that 
he meant to set before us such a representation of his 
death in its relation to the divine attributes and to moral 
government as we find in Paul, is completely to disregard 
the method of Jesus in the interest of dogmatic opinion. 
But strong as the presumption is against such a view, the 
facts of the case are stronger still, and there could be no 
better proof of this than that which is furnished by the 
circumstance that after the current exegesis has professed. 
to find the doctrine of substitution and satisfaction in AvTpoy 
and es ddeow auaptidy, its representatives virtually sur- 
render the case by the admission that these ideas could 
only be developed after Jesus’ death by reflection upon its 
significance. 

We turn next to the Pauline Epistles, and the first rele- 
vant fact which we meet is that the apostle had received 
through the primitive Christian tradition from the Lord 
himself the truth that Jesus died for (é7ép) our sins in ful- 
filment of Scripture (1 Cor. xv. 3). This tradition is the 
earliest testimony concerning the relation between the 


120 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 





death of Christ and salvation from sin which we possess. 
It is common to assume that Paul means to tell us here that 
his own doctrine of atonement and of forgiveness as con- 
ditioned by it, was contained in the primitive Christian 
teaching, and even in that of Jesus himself. But this the 
apostle does not say, and there is no sufficient evidence 
that such was the fact. In order to prove it we should need 
to find this view presented in such fragments of the teach- 
ing of the first Christians as we possess, and sustained by 
the words of Jesus himself. The only claim which can be 
made in favor of the first point must be derived from 1 Peter. 
The early discourses in Acts contain no suggestion of the 
Pauline idea of a substitutionary expiation. Christ’s death 
is depicted in terms drawn from the description of the 
suffering Servant. It is never even described in terms 
of sacrifice. 1 Peter advances beyond this point of view 
and makes use of sacrificial analogies (1 Pet. i. 11, 18, 19; 
ii. 18), though the death is correlated, as in Hebrews, 
with moral cleansing rather than, as in Paul, with a legal © 
acquittal from guilt. The point already mentioned, that 
this Epistle—by whomsoever written—seems to show 
many marks of dependence upon Paul, is relevant here, 
though it is one which, of course, can only be decided in 
the forum of criticism. The maintenance of the second — 
point, that the expiatory idea was a part of Jesus’ own 
teaching, would depend on the success of the interpreta-— 
tions which discover this conception in the passages from — 
the Gospels already reviewed. The argument may be 
summarized thus: Paul says that the primitive Church, 

and, indeed, Jesus himself, taught that he died to save 

men from sin, and we find Jesus saying (in the Matthew- 

passage) that his blood was shed “for the forgiveness of 

sins.” Now from Paul we know in what sense he died 

“for sins” or for their forgiveness, that is, to make a 

satisfaction to God’s justice which might open the way 

to their pardon ; therefore the first Christians and Jesus 

himself must have taught this, and we find such to be the 

case, since Jesus said that he gave his life as a ransom- 

price, that is (see the Septuagint), as an atoning sacrifice. 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 121 


One sees what are the materials of which this structure is 
built: the substitutionary character of sacrifice ; AvTpov 
as denoting such a sacrifice ; the phrase “for the forgive- 
ness of sins” not only original but requiring to be juridi- 
cally interpreted. Who could fail to observe the circular 
character of the argument? ‘The words of Jesus are read 
in the light of Pauline ideas, and then the Pauline ideas 
are found to be confirmed and illustrated by the words 
of Jesus, the whole procedure being dominated by a fixed 
adherence to traditional dogma and by the assumption 
that this dogma will be found wherever the New Testa- 
ment is opened. ‘This mode of argument seems to me to 
render all historical understanding of the development of 
the doctrine of Christ’s death in the early Church absolutely 
impossible. 

But, in any case, we have in Paul the outlines of a fairly 
definite theory. It is the theory of a substitutionary ex- 
piation. There are adumbrations of it elsewhere in the 
New Testament, and it is possible, but not, to my mind, 
certain, that it was in some measure shared by the authors 
of 1 Peter, Hebrews, and the Johannine writings. But 
however this may be, it is formulated by no other New 
Testament writer, and I question whether it would ever 
have been derived from them if we had not possessed an 
elaboration of it in the Pauline Epistles. The traditional 
doctrines of atonement are reproductions of Paulinism, 
with variations and additions. Now the questions of 
special interest here are: (1): What is the relation of this 
theory to the current Jewish ideas of the vicarious suffer- 
ings of the righteous? (2) What is its relation to other 
elements of Paul’s thought—such as his mysticism and 
his doctrine of God? and finally, (3) What is its avail- 
ability, or in what form is it available, for the thought of 
to-day ? 

The first of these questions is sure to receive more atten- 
tion than heretofore from students who approach theologi- 
cal questions in a historic method and spirit. From such 
study as I have been able to devote to the subject it seems 
to me clear that this late Jewish doctrine is the obvious 


122 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


source of Paul’s theory of substitution. But it must have 
undergone a partial transformation at hishands. Speaking 
of the passages from 4 Maccabees which illustrate this 
idea (cf. p. 59), Deissmann says that the conception which 
they embody “did not arise asa hard, dogmatic theorem, 
but is decisively determined by the mysterious and keen 
intuition of religious pathos.”! The same undoubtedly 
holds true of the classic expression of the idea which we 
have in Isa. lii. 13-liii. 12, according to its original spirit 
and design. Its belongs to the prophetic, rather than 
to the priestly, order of ideas. The vicariousness which it 
represents is not the vicariousness of literal substitution 
and legal transfer, but the vicariousness of real experience 
in which the faithful and righteous bear on their hearts the 
woes and burdens entailed by the careless and the sinful. 

We cannot pursue this subject further at present, but, 
before leaving it, let me commend to the reader the follow- 
ing suggestive passage from Dr. George Adam Smith re- 
garding these two standpoints and the relation of each to 
Christian theology : “ Unfortunately, both in Jewish and in 
Christian theology, it has been the sacrificial animals and 
not the human Servant, Law and not Prophecy, which have 
governed the conceptions of atonement for sin. Symbol 
and ritual were among ancient people the best vehicle for 
the tradition of ideas, and therefore we can understand 
why, till our Lord’s time, the truths we are treating should 
find their favorite popular expression in the forms of ani- 
mal sacrifice, and why Christ himself should associate his 
supreme self-sacrifice with the Paschal Lamb. But even 
the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who dwells more 
than any other New Testament writer upon the Leyitical 
antitypes of Christ, shows their insufficiency, and precedes 
his exposition of them by majestic emphasis on the human- 
ity of Christ—as distinct from an official priesthood —and 
by illustration of this from those human aspects of vica- 
rious service in the Old Testament which fill his opening 
chapters. This example, unfortunately for Christianity, has 
been misunderstood, not by the greatest theologians, but by 


1 Kautsch, Die Apocryphen, u. s. w., II. 160. 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 123 


the smaller ones, and by generation after generation of 
popular preachers. It is because Christian divines have 
dwelt too much on the Old Testament system of sacrifices 
and too little upon the figures of Jeremiah, the suffering 
remnant and the Servant of the Lord: too much upon the 
animal types of the Cross, and too little upon the human 
forerunners of Christ: that their explanations of the 
vicarious character of the passion and death of the Re- 
deemer have so often been mechanical and repulsive. 
Certainly in our day, when animal sacrifices have so long 
ceased to speak to the imagination and conscience of 
men, it is the direst blunder a preacher may commit to 
dwell upon them except for the barest of exegetical pur- 
poses. = If we are to get our fellows to believe in the 
redemptive virtue of Christ’s Cross, it will be by proving 
to them that vicarious suffering and its ethical virtue are 
no arbitrary enactments of God, but natural to life and 
inevitable wherever sin and holiness, guilt and love, en- 
counter and contend. ‘Non est dolor nisi de amore 
amisso, quanto profundior erat amor tanto altius tangit 
dolor.*+ And in this we shall succeed most readily by 
proving, as we can do from the history which we have 
been traversing, that the figure of a Sufferer, holy and un- 
defiled, by whose stripes we are healed, by whosé bearing 
of our iniquities we are justified, was derived and con- 
fidently expected by men, not because Heaven had arbi- 
trarily proclaimed it, but out of their own experiences of 
life and death, the very elements of which provided them 
with their marvellous picture of him.” ? 

The second and third questions, and others besides them, 
will come into further consideration as we proceed. We 
need only pause to note the difficulty which theologians 
have found in combining Paul’s doctrine of reconciliation 
with other elements of his system. If reconciliation 
is “ objective ” as well as “subjective,” — to use the cur- 
rent antithesis,—if it involves an adjustment of God 


1 Hugo of St. Victor, on Gen. vi. 6. 
2 Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament, pp. 170- 
172. 


124 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


toward man as well as a change in man’s attitude to God, 
how, then, can God himself provide for it? In what pos- 
sible sense can he reconcile or satisfy himself or provide 
for the appeasement of his own wrath? Can God do 
something, or arrange to have something done, whereby 
his own feeling shall be changed? But if it is said that 
the divine love provides for the satisfaction of justice, 
does not this unwarrantably narrow the divine love and 
quite as unwarrantably divide the divine nature? Shall 
we conclude with Principal Simon that “love and anger 
per se are mutually exclusive” ; that a father, for example, 
cannot be angry with his child without ceasing, to that 
extent, to love him, and that, therefore, the only course 
open to God is “ whilst angry, carefully to search for means 
of vanquishing the indifference (of men), and converting 
the contemptuous aversion into loving regard”?! This 
view is adopted, no doubt, in deference to Paul, but what, 
then, becomes of Paul’s own teaching that “God commend- 
eth his love to us” in the redemptive death of Christ? If 
this method of explanation is not feasible, can we find a 
better one? If,as Dr. Dale says, God cannot both demand 
and provide the ransom; “he could not pay it to himself,” 2 
what then? To whom could he pay it? Shall we answer 
with several of the Church fathers, “to Satan,” or with 
Dr. Dale himself, ‘to the divine law”? The former an- 
swer deserts Pauline principles entirely, since, ea hypothest, 
it is not Satan, but God, who requires to be satisfied ; the 
latter does the -same, and, in addition, deifies an abstrac- 
tion, as if there were any such thing as God’s law above or 
apart from God, to which God himself could render trib- 
ute.2 These illustrations may serve to exhibit the diffieul- 
ties which beset the customary procedure in the treatment 
of Paul’s idea of expiation. Taken as a “hard, dogmatic 
theorem” it is seen, in the hands of those who so regard it, 
to yield not only the most divergent results, but to give 
rise to inferences which it is by no means easy to reconcile 


1 The Redemption of Man, pp. 260, 261. 
2 Atonement, p. 357. 
3 See Adamson, Art, Reconciliation, in Hastings’s D. B. 


ae 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS Fo 5) 


with Paul’s own language concerning the action of God 
and the nature of salvation. 

We have seen that the author of Hebrews interprets 
Christ’s death in terms of sacrifice. But he is careful 
to explain that it is not a sacrifice of the Levitical order. 
He insists upon the inefficacy of all animal offerings. The 
blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sin. Of what 
sort, then, is Christ’s sacrifice? It is the offering on our 
behalf, and as our representative, of a pure and spotless 
spiritual life. The solidarity of Christ with mankind re- 
ceives strong emphasis. Sanctified and Sanctifier are of one 
family. He shared in our flesh and blood, identified him- 
self with the seed of Abraham, was made like unto his 
brethren, submitted himself to our temptations. This is 
the practical use which the author makes of the categories 
of priesthood and sacrifice. They serve to emphasize the 
representative character of his person and his work. They 
accentuate his sympathy, his unity with men, and his par- 
ticipation in their lot and life. This oneness with man- 
kind is the essential condition of his priesthood. “It was 
fitting, morally necessary, that in all things he be made like 
unto his brethren that he might be a merciful and faithful 
High Priest in things pertaining to God to make expia- 
tion for the sins of the people.” 

We have seen, furthermore, how by making use of the 
Philonic distinction of the higher and the lower, the heav- 
enly and the sensible worlds, the author really takes Christ 
out of the class of earthly priests and gives to his person 

and work an entirely superior character and significance. 
His priesthood is of a wholly different nature. The 
Melchizedek story is used to accentuate its independence 
of all earthly conditions; but it is chiefly the Alexandrian 
conception of the intelligible world which is used to 
illustrate its superiority. The priesthood and sacrifice of 
Christ, in their inmost significance, have nothing in com- 
‘mon with the temporary, carnal, and ineffective institutions 
of Judaism. They belong to a different world — the world 
of heavenly and eternal reality. It was not material blood 
or animal life which constituted the essence of his sacrifice, 





126 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


but “an eternal spirit ” of condescending, sympathetic, an 

suffering love. ‘The popular interpretation of this Epistl 

commonly assumes that because its author expounds th 

work of redemption in the terminology of sacrifice, there- 
fore its meaning is to be determined throughout by reading 
it in the light of Leviticalism. But the whole point of ne 
exposition turns on the contrast between Christ’s sacrifice 
and the Levitical offerings. It is different from them in 
every respect. The priest is of a different order, is con- 
nected with a different system, ministers in a different 
sanctuary, and makes an offering of an entirely different 
kind. The author lays the strongest emphasis upon the 
insufficiency of all the material and outward elements and 
aspects of sacrifice. These are but the pictures and sem= 
blances of reality. In its higher and true meaning sacri- 
fice belongs to the heavenly or spiritual world—as we 
should say, to the world of ethical truth and personal 
relationships. The capital fact to be observed is that in 
way peculiar to his training and habits of thought the 
author ethicizes the whole subject of sacrifice and ascribes 
to Christ’s offering of himself a wholly different nature 
from ‘that which belongs to the Levitical oblations. To 
overlook this fact in the study of the Epistle would be like 
overlooking the difference between Paul’s doctrine of justi 
fication and the Pharisaic doctrine, because Paul uses the 
juridical terminology which was current in the Jewish 


A 






schools. 

Another point of special importance is the direct vay 
in which Christ’s work is correlated with the moral life of 
man. His offering cleanses the conscience and renews the 
heart. Sacrificial blood purifies ceremonially ; his blood 
purifies morally. The author’s doctrine of the aim and 
effect of Christ’s work is very simple —so simple that we 
are at a loss to know how he conceived Christ’s sacrifice 
as accomplishing this result. It is common, at this point, 
to interpolate enough of Paulinism to supply an answer te 
this question. This would be less objectionable if it were 
always plainly stated that the explanation is interpolated. 
But this procedure is, to say the least, precarious. As we 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 1 AAS 


have seen, the author makes no use of the Pauline ideas of 
a satisfaction rendered to righteousness as a condition 
precedent of forgiveness. In some way he conceived the 
sacrifice of Christ as directly operative in salvation. 

Finally, I would call attention to the fact that Jesus’ 
offering of himself is something more than dying. As in 
his own teaching, he is represented as giving his life for 
men. It is life not death which is the essence of all true 
sacrifice. Even in the Levitical system the blood is sacri- 
ficial because “the blood is the life.” This thought is 
greatly emphasized and elaborated in our Epistle by 
means of the conception of a perpetual ministry in heaven 
—a continuous offering of his life on behalf of his people. 
For our author the same forces, principles, and laws which 
were operative in the life, work, and sufferings of Jesus on 
earth are perpetually operative on behalf of the salvation 
of men.! 

It is evident that if the interpretation which I have 
given of the New Testament data is correct, or even 
approximately correct, the doctrine of the saving import 
of Christ’s death was the subject of a considerable devel- 
opment even within the first Christian century. The 
teaching of Jesus that he had come to give his life, that 
is, to devote himself in utmost service to men, and that 
this self-devotion would involve him in the endurance of 
suffering and death, was taken up after his departure and 
elaborated now in terms of the current doctrine of the 
vicarious sufferings of the righteous and again in terms of 
the Jewish sacrificial ritual. Though influenced by both 
these forms of thought, Paul went behind them both and 
raised the question of the relation of this saving deed of 
Christ to the ethical nature of God. The vicarious and 
the sacrificial ideas were the current coin of Jewish 
thought, and even though they had in a measure hardened 
into dogma, still they had much of the fluidity and indefi- 
niteness of the popular religious feeling and practice with 
which they were identified. Did the righteous in Israel 


1 Cf. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews, ch. xxi., on The Theological 
Import of the Epistle. 


128 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


who suffered,with the guilty and so for the sake of the 
guilty also suffer, in the proper sense, instead of the 
guilty? How far the doctrine may have taken this defi- 
nite form of a strict substitution it is difficult to say. It 
is quite certain that, generally speaking, the thought of 
vicarious suffering was not so definite and precise. Much 
the same must be said concerning sacrifice. Though in 
its original intention and idea the offering was not viewed — 
as a substitute for the offerer, but as his gift of adoration 
or devotion to the Deity, yet evidence is not wanting that 
in the late period the ideas of a literal substitution and of 
a transfer of sin had gained currency. It was a concep- 
tion which lay near to hand—all the more so as ritual 
was magnified and took on more and more an opus opera- 
tum character. The idea that by a literal transfer of guilt 
the Lord should lay upon another, or upon a sacrificial 
victim, the iniquities of the sinner, is so clear, so simple, 
and so easy, that it would naturally commend itself to a 
mode of thought for which religion consisted primarily in 
ritual and ceremony. It is a theory which presupposes 
and fosters no strenuous moral ideas of religion. It would 
be safe to predict that if the apostle Paul is to make use 
of it, he will ethicize, deepen, and transform it and will 
never tolerate the superficial idea of an easy, mechanical 
transfer of man’s guilt and penalty to another by which 
the sinner shall be exempted from the demands and opera- 
tion of moral law. We have seen that this is the case. 
Paul makes use of the conception of substitution, but at 
the same time, by his intensely ethical view of God’s 
requirements and his mystical conception of man’s spir- 
itual relation to Christ as the second Adam, he has deep- 
ened this substitution into a moral identification or 
solidarity. 

The outstanding peculiarity of the Pauline thought con- 
cerning expiation is that he has explicitly correlated the 
subject with the ethical nature of God. Just as he was 
the first Christian thinker to raise questions as to the re- 
lation of Christ’s person to the metaphysical nature of God, 
so was he the first to seek to define the way in which the 





SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 129 


death of Christ revealed and satisfied the immanent right- 
eousness of God. In this effort he was the forerunner of 
all the profoundest thought of later times which could not 
content itself, as naive religious feeling may do, with some 
such mechanical conception as that Christ has paid our 
debt, but necessarily presses behind all such figures of 
speech and asks what are the personal relationships and 
the moral realities with which the work of Christ is con- 
cerned. We have seen that there are differing judgments 
among interpreters as to how far these deeper problems are 
considered in other New Testament books, such as 1 Peter, 
Hebrews, and the Johannine writings. The popular as- 
sumption, which some scholars seek to justify, is that the 
Pauline thought is everywhere implied and more or less 
fully expressed. It seems to me, however, that while the 
relation of Christ’s work to the divine nature is, indeed, 
touched upon in these writings, no one of these authors 
has definitely proposed the problem to himself, as Paul 
did. The nearest approximation to it is found in John, 
who has so profoundly connected the person of Christ with 
the interior life of God. It would be inevitable that this 
method of thought should be more or less applied to the 
work of Christ, and this we find to be the case in the de- 
duction of the “ propitiation for sin” from the nature of 
God as love. But this writer’s immediate and primary 
concern, especially in his Gospel, is with the person of 
Christ, rather than with the problems raised by his suffer- 
ings and death. The focus of his thought and interest, to 
speak in modern terms, is the incarnation, not the atone- 
ment. So far as the author of Hebrews uses the facts of 
the ritual he interprets them in the popular sense; the 
originality and unique value of his exposition lie in his 
viewing these categories, as applied to Christ, sub specie 
aeternitatis. The other New Testament books furnish no 
elaboration of the subject from the point of view under 
consideration. The early apostolic discourses assert a 
providential character and purpose for the death of Christ, 
but do not carry us further ; 1 Peter depicts the spotless 
Lamb in the spirit of Isa. lili, but proposes no explana- 


130 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 

tion of the necessity of his death ; the Apocalypse makes 
frequent use of the current sacrificial language, but yields 
no view of the relation of Christ’s death to the divine law 
or nature, unless it may be inferred from such rhetorical — 
figures as “the Lamb standing in the midst of God’s— 
throne” (vy. 6), suggesting that love and sacrifice are at 
the heart of God’s sovereignty." 

The three forms of New Testament thought, then, which 
may fairly be said to furnish the elements of a theological 
theory of atonement are these: (1) the deduction of pro- 
pitiation from the divine love (John) ; (2) the exposition 
of Christ’s sacrifice as a fact of the heavenly world, the 
eternal order (Hebrews); and (3) the elaboration of the © 
conception of Christ’s death as a penal substitute for 
the death which sin had deserved —a satisfaction to law — 
or justice, whereby the obstacle to the operation of grace 
is removed; a satisfaction for which, however, God — 
in his love provides (Paul). It so happens that in the 
order of complexity and elaborateness the chronological — 
order of those theories is exactly reversed. Paul’s is the 
earliest, but the most elaborate. John’s is the simplest, — 
though he wrote latest. Ever since the New Testament 
period reflective thought has been occupied with the prob- 
lems thus suggested and defined. One who is familiar ~ 
with the history of theology can detect the presence, com- — 
bination, and modification of these points of view in the 
various theories of redemption. Paul’s conceptions have 
been by far the most determining, but the other points of — 
view have, in recent times, come into greater prominence. 
Some still maintain a formal unity among all the types of 
New Testament reflection; to others, as to myself, the 


1 The phrase ‘‘ written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the 
foundation of the world’? (xiii. 8; so A. V.and R. V.), which has been so 
often used as a text for the doctrine of ‘‘ eternal atonement” (see, e.g. 
Hitchcock’s Eternal Atonement), is almost certainly a mistranslation. 
The phrase ‘‘from the foundation of the world”? should be connected 
with ‘‘ written,’? a construction to which we have an exact parallel in 
Rey. xvii. 8. (So R. V., marg.; Twentieth Century New Testament ; Weiz- 
sicker’s Translation, and Am. R. V. So, also, Ewald, De Wette, Bleek, 
Diisterdieck, Simcox, and most modern commentators.) 


fe 
: | SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 131 


unity appears rather in the underlying conceptions of God 
and of the inner nature of salvation. Some still maintain 
the perpetually binding character of Paul’s Jewish thought- 
forms; others venture to seek for Paul’s fundamental re- 
ligious convictions beneath these and are of opinion that 
though his Christian theology is cast in these moulds, it 
is not identical with them. What is Pauline? What is 
scriptural? Is every conception of which Paul made use 
a necessary part of his religion, and of ours, — physical 
death due to sin, our sin due to Adam’s,' Christ’s speedy, 
visible return to earth? As I have frequently intimated, 
it seems to me that no fruitful investigation of the begin- 
nings of Christian theology can be made without recogniz- 
ing the distinction between the contingent thought-forms 
of the first Christian thinkers and the essential religious 
life and fundamental Christian certainties concerning God 
and the experience of salvation which they were seeking 
to expound and to philosophize. Christianity is not iden- 
tical with the special modes of thought which any partic- 
ular thinker, speaking the language of his special circle 
or peculiar education, may use to illustrate and convey to 
others the most effective impression of its truths. If so, 
with which of several New Testament types of thought is 
it identical, —with the ethicism of John, the Alexandrian- 
ism of Hebrews, or the legalism of Paul? The religion of 
the New Testament is something more than a composite of 
the various arguments, analogies, and illustrations em- 
ployed by its writers.” 


1 For a frank and thorough investigation and estimation of the Pauline 
ideas of sin, see Tennant, The Fall and Original Sin, ch. xi. Elsewhere 
Mr. Tennant writes : ‘‘ We take the responsibility upon ourselves of en- 
deayoring to discriminate between the thought and knowledge which an 
apostle derived from the common intellectual surroundings of his time 
and the essential contents of the Christian revelation of God and morality 
which he sought to express in terms of it. The one element abides and 
grows. The other is transitory and incomplete; it invites continual 
translation and restatement, which is always to be undertaken, however, 
in the same spirit as characterized the truth’s first formulation.’ The 
Origin and Propagation of Sin, p. 146. 

2 «Die sogenannte practische Erklarung der Schrift, welche vielleicht 
den werthvollsten Bestandtheil aller practischen Theologie ausmacht, 


























132 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 


In this general review of the scriptural data bea 
upon the doctrine of salvation, and especially in 
final summary, I have aimed to bring out the salien 
features of each of the principal types of New Testamer 
teaching. Partly because of limitations of space, ar 
partly on account of the large place which the subject holds 
in theological discussions and controversies, I have givei 
special attention to the question of the relation of the 
death of Christ to the salvation of men. I will conclud 
this survey by illustrating the variety of forms in which 
throughout the New Testament, the significance of Christ's 
death is represented and illustrated. This I can best de 
by availing myself of a collation of the relevant passage 
made by Schmiedel:1 “ The Epistle of James exhibits 
Christianity without any reflection upon the saving s 
nificance of Christ’s death. To Jesus himself his death 
appeared — until within a short time before its occurrence 
—as a possibly avoidable appointment of God. It has 
the character of an unwitting sin of the Jews in Acts iii 
13-15, 17: ‘The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and o: 
Jacob, the God of our fathers, hath glorified his Servani 
Jesus ; whom ye delivered up, and denied before the face 
of Pilate, when he had determined to release him. Bu 
ye denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for 
murderer to be granted unto you, and killed the Prince 
of life; whom God raised from the dead ; whereof we 2 
witnesses. And now, brethren, I wot that in ignorance ye 
did it, as did also yourrulers.’? It is viewed as the resul 
of a divine destination of the Messiah to suffering, but 
without having a saving purpose ascribed to it, in Acts 
iii. 18, ‘But the things which God foreshewed by the 


kann an Bedeutung nur gewinnen, wenn das zu erreichende Ziel so ge- 
steckt werden muss, dass es in Zukunft gilt, die Religion des Neuen 
Testamentes zu verkiindigen, ohne desshalb neutestamentliche Lehrbe 
griffe zu predigen.’’ Holtzmann, Newtest. Theol. I. x. 
1 Theol. Zeitschrijt aus der Schweitz, 1893, p. 227 sq., quoted by 
Holtzmann, Neutest. Theol. I. 372. I have merely translated the pas- 
sage and, in addition, have cited the principal illustrative texts, instes 
of giving only the references to them. 
2 Cf. v. 30. 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 133 


mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ should suffer, 
he thus fulfilled.’ It serves as a means of exalting Jesus 
himself to heavenly glory in Jn. xii. 23 sq.: ‘And Jesus 
answereth them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of 
man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, 
Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abid- 
eth by itself alone ; but if it die, it beareth much fruit. 
He that loveth his life loseth it; and he that hateth his 
life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” Through 
it he learns obedience according to Heb. v. 1 sq.; eg. 
‘Though he was a Son, yet learned he obedience by the 
things which he suffered ; and having been made perfect, 
he became unto all them that obey him the author of eter- 
nal salvation.’ It serves his own consecration, with the 
wider purpose of consecrating his disciples, in Jn. xvii. 
19-26; e.g. ‘For their sakes I sanctify myself, that they 
themselves also may be sanctified in truth.’ It is a 
purifying offering for his people in Eph. v. 2 and 25 sq.; 
e.g. ‘Walk in love, even as Christ also loved you, and 
gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God 
for an odour of a sweet smell.’ It is an offering of deliver- 
ance and at the same time a covenant offering, according 
to Jesus’ last indication in Mk. xiv. 22-24, ‘My blood 
of the covenant shed for many.’ Again it isan exemption 
offering, to be understood according to the true idea of 
Isa. liii, but not permanently adequate and therefore 
requiring to be supplemented by the suffering of Paul (and 
in principle also of others), according to Col. i. 24, ‘Now 
I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and fill up on my 
part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my 
flesh for his body’s sake, which is the Church.’ With a 
one-sided reference to the ceremonial law, it is represented 
as a covenant offering in Heb. ix. 15-20 and x. 29: 
‘Mediator of a new covenant’; ‘the blood of the cov- 
enant,’ etc. It subserves the reconciliation of Jews and. 
heathen, as a kind of peace offering, in Eph. ii. 13-16: 
‘But now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are 
made nigh in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, 


1 Cf. xvii. 1. 


134 THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE 































who made both one, and brake down the middle wall of 
partition, having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even 
the law of commandments contained in ordinances ; that 
he might create in himself of the twain one new man, 
so making peace; and might reconcile them both in one 
body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity 
thereby.’ It reconciles the angelic powers with God in Col. 
i. 20, ‘ Through him to reconcile all things unto himself, 
having made peace through the blood of his cross; through 
him, I say, whether things upon the earth, or things in the 
heavens.’ It appears as an atoning offering for sin, with. 
out more exact determination, in 1 Cor. xy. 3; Mt. xxvi. 
28; Eph.i. 7; Jn. i. 29, and elsewhere (‘Christ died for ou 

sins’; ‘my blood shed for many unto remission of sins’; 
‘redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our tres- 
passes’; ‘the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of 
the world’); with one-sided reference to the ceremonial 
law, without substitutionary endurance of punishment, in 
Heb. v. 1, 3, vii. 27, and ix. 26, 28 (« A High Priest offers 
ing both gifts and sacrifices for sins’; ‘he offered a sacri- 
fice for sins once for all when he offered up himself’ ; 
‘manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself’ ; 
‘offered to bear the sins of many’); as a substitutionary 
satisfaction to penal righteousness in Rom. iii. 25 s8g., 
‘whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, 
by his blood, to shew his righteousness, because of the 
passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance 
of God.’ It is a ransom from the curse of the law in Gal. 
iii. 13; Rom. ili. 24; 1 Cor. vi. 20, and vii. 23 (Christ re- 
deemed us from the curse of the law, having become a 
curse for us’; ‘justified through the redemption that is in 
Christ Jesus’ ; ‘ ye were bought with a price’). It means 
the destruction of the power of the devil in Heb. ii. 14 sq. + 
‘that he might bring to naught him that had the power o 
death, that is, the devil,’ etc.; annihilation of the power 
which dwells in the flesh and compels to sin, in Rom. viii. 
3 sq.: ‘God sending his own Son . . . condemned sin in 
the flesh,’ ete. ; is viewed as a vanquishing of the inclina- 
tion that leads to sin in 1 Pet. i. 18, ii. 24, and iv. 1 (re- 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 135 


deemed from your vain manner of life’; ‘bare our sins 
... that we might live unto righteousness’; ‘since 
Christ has suffered, ... arm yourselves with the same 
mind’). It occasions the sending of the Holy Spirit 
according to Jn. xv. 26, xvi. 7;1 ‘If I go not away, the 
Comforter will not come unto you.’ It serves, on the 
analogy of the ceremonial law, for the consecration of 
the heavenly temple, in connection with perpetual inter- 
cession before God, in Heb. vii. 25, ix. 21-24, and x. 19: 
‘The heavenly things, or places, themselves must be 
cleansed with better sacrifices than these’ (animal-offer- 
ings), and opens the way to the preparation of the place 
of eternal blessedness in heaven according to Jn. xii. 32, 
xiv. 2 sq., and xvii. 24, ‘If I go and prepare a place for 
you, I come again, and will receive you unto myself ; that 
where I am, there ye shall be also.’ Only the charac- 
teristic passages are herewith adduced.” 


1 Of, vii. 39. 


eh oe en 


PART I 


THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 





















y 


CHAPTER I 
THE COMMERCIAL THEORY OF ANSELM 


It lies outside the plan of the present work to write the 
history of the doctrine of salvation in the Church. For 
that the reader is referred to the standard histories of 
Christian doctrine.1 It is, however, germane to our pur- 
pose, and will greatly facilitate our subsequent discussions, 
to outline the principal types of theory which have ob- 
tained in Christian thought regarding the specific probler 
of atonement. By means of such a sketch it can best a 
shown in what various ways the death of Christ has been 
interpreted and how Christian reflection has attached it- 
self now to one, now to another, of the biblical representa- 
tions of the subject. We shall cover the ground which 
we most need to survey if we review the “ commercial” 
satisfaction theory of Anselm,—noting the transformation 
which it experienced at the hands of the Reformation an 
post-Reformation theologians, — the governmental theory 
of Grotius, and the more recent and present-day interpre- 
tations. While precise classification is impracticable, it 
will be sufficient for our illustrative purpose to distin- 
guish, among present-day theories, three general types 0 

1 £.g. Fisher’s History of Christian Doctrine and Ritschl’s 
History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliati 
A historical sketch of the doctrine of atonement is given in the appen 
to Lidgett’s work, The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement, and ano 
somewhat more limited in range, in the appendix to Moberly’s 4 
ment and Personality. I have frequently consulted these expositi 
but have had recourse chiefly for my illustrative materials to the writi 
of the authors whose views I have sketched. 

136 


THE COMMERCIAL THEORY OF ANSELM 137 


thought: (1) That which insists upon a strict substitution 
and ascribes a penal character to the sufferings of Christ. 
This type of theory is in line with the post-Reformation 
doctrine. (2) The theories of a satisfaction to the ethical 
nature, especially to the holiness of God, which, however, 
repudiate the idea of a penal substitution or equivalence. 
This group of views is more or less closely akin to the 
governmental theory. (8) The moral views which aim to 
interpret the work of Christ in terms of personal relation- 
ship and influences. . 

The earliest Church Fathers made no attempt to con- 
struct theories of atonement. They viewed the death of 
Christ as the fulfilment of prophecy, especially of Isa. 
lili, and, in this view, as the supreme attestation of 
Christ’s mission.!_ Clement of Rome sees in the Lord’s 
death a proof of the divine love, but does not further 
define its relation to the nature of God. The Epistle of 
Barnabas, like the Epistle to the Hebrews, refers to the 
Saviour’s death in terms of sacrifice, but offers no philoso- 
phy of its necessity or efficacy. The writings of Ignatius 
regard the love shown in Christ’s death as a cleansing, life- 
bestowing power, and are fond of depicting his body and 
blood as the spiritual nourishment of the soul. The Epis- 
tle to Diognetus couples with the idea that God’s love is 
supremely manifested in the death of his Son, the doctrine 
of a “sweet exchange,” a transfer of our iniquities to 
Christ and of his righteousness to us. Justin Martyr and 
Clement of Alexandria contemplate Christianity as the 
divine philosophy. For them, as in the Fourth Gospel, 
the thought of revelation is paramount. In the view of 
the former, Christ suffered “as if accursed,” “though he 
was blameless”; according to the latter, his death was a 
martyrdom endured in fidelity to the truth, “in imitation 
of whom the apostles suffered for the churches which they 

1“*To them it was not the atonement, but the incarnation, which was 
the centre of Christian faith as of Christian life. The Fathers see in 
Christ’s death, not an isolated act, or even an isolated sacrifice, but the 
_ natural consummation of that one great act of self-devotion whose un- 


broken energy stretched from the conception to the cross.’? Oxenham, 
The Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, p. 166. 























138 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


founded.” But though in Justin’s view, Christ “endure 
the curses of all,” no explanation is given why this wa 
necessary. Tertullian introduced the term “ satisfaction,” 
though he placed this satisfaction in penitence. We are 
“released from penalty by the compensating exchange of 
repentance.” He offers no theory of the death of Christ. 

The first definite theory of the saving import of Christ’s 
death is the view that it was a conquest of Satan, or, more 
specifically, a ransom paid to him to induce him to release 
man from his power. This was the dominant note in 
Christian thought on the subject for nearly a thousand 
years, —from Irenzeus (d. ca. 200) to Anselm (d. 1109),— 
though it was often combined with various views, penal, 
ethical, and mystical, which were quite incongruous w 
it. Sometimes it was held that Satan had legitimately 
acquired this power, since by sin man had voluntarily 
become his vassal. In this view the Almighty was not 
at liberty to use force or deception in procuring man’s 
release. Now in Christ, the representative of the race, 
argues Irenzus, man freely chose to repudiate his servituc 
to Satan and to return to God. Here Christ’s redemption 
of man is viewed as accomplished by moral means. The 
aim of his death is to induce and help us to forsake alle- 
giance to Satan and return to obedience toGod. But it was 
common to represent the recovery of man as accomplished 
by force or fraud. According to Origen, Satan was de- 
ceived in supposing that he could hold the soul of Christ 
captive. He relinquished his control of man in return for 
what he supposed would be a control of Christ, but he 
miscalculated the strength of the latter, and lost his sway 
over both. Gregory of Nyssa explicitly says that God 
employed deceit to defeat Satan, but holds that this was 
legitimate on account of the good end in view —the sal- 
vation of man, and even, ultimately, of the devil himself. 
Gregory the Great describes Satan as caught with the 
hook of Christ’s divinity which had been concealed in his 
humanity. To Peter Lombard the cross was a trap baited 
with Christ’s blood. 

But the elements of other theories are also present dur 


THE COMMERCIAL THEORY OF ANSELM 139 


ing this period. The penal satisfaction theory is found 
in Origen and Gregory the Great. The former does not 
hesitate to declare that by his offering, Christ has ren- 
dered God propitious toward men. Gregory holds that in 
yielding himself up to suffering and death at the hands of 
sinful men, Christ was appeasing God’s wrath by taking 
on himself the penalty of our sins. But the germs of 
“moral influence theories’ are also found. We saw that, 
according to Irenzeus, Christ induced men by persuasion 
toforsake Satan. Although Augustine employed the com- 
mon conception of a redemption from Satanic power, his 
view of the subject in general completely transcends it. 
He will not affirm that God could have accomplished man’s 
salvation by no other means than Christ’s death, but holds 
that this was the most suitable and effective method. “For 
what,” he says, ‘‘ was so necessary to raise our hope and 
to liberate from despair of immortality the minds of mor- 
tals cast down by the condition_of mortality, as that it 
should be proved to us how highly God valued us and 
how much he loved us?”! “The spirit of the Mediator 
showed how it was through no punishment of sin that he 
came to the death of the flesh, because he did not leave it 
against his will, but because he willed, when he willed, as 
he willed.” 2 “What is meant,” he asks, “by ‘justified 
in his blood’? What power is there in this blood that 
those who believe should be justified in it? And what 
is meant by ‘being reconciled by the death of his Son’? 
Was it, indeed, so that when God the Father was wroth 
with us, he saw the death of his Son for us, and was ap- 
peased toward us? Was then his Son already so far 
appeased toward us that he even deigned to die for us, 
while the Father was still so far wroth, that except his 
Son died for us, he would not be appeased?... Unless 
the Father had been already appeased, would he have 
delivered up his own Son, not sparing him for us?.. 

But I see that the Father loved us also before, not only 
before the Son died for us, but before he created the 
world; ... therefore together both the Father and the 


1 Qn the Trinity, Bk. XIII. ch. x. 2 Op. cit., Bk. IV. ch. xiii. 


140 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


















Son and the Spirit of both work all things equally and 
harmoniously.” ! Elsewhere he expresses the view that 
it was the aim of the Mediator of life to make it plain to 
men that it is not death which is to be feared, but ungod- 
liness —a noticeable anticipation of a modern view that 
by his heroic and trustful endurance of death in fidelity 
to his calling Christ has set men free from the fear and 
dominion of death, consecrated for all his followers the | 
path of suffering, and transformed death into a trustful 
surrender of the soul into the hands of God.? Others” 
interpret Christ’s death in terms more exclusively ethical 
or mystical. For Abelard the passion is a proof of love, 
which by awakening in us a responsive love liberates us 
from the bondage of sin and fear, and delivers us into the 
liberty of the sons of God. For Peter Lombard the cross 
is the pledge of a love so great that by it our hearts are 
moved and kindled to a love to God which is itself the 
essence of salvation. For Bernard of Clairvaux salvation 
is participation in Christ’s vicarious love. 

It will be apparent from this brief sketch how inaceu- 
rate it is to represent, without qualification, the theory of 
a ransom paid to the devil as the patristic view of atone-— 
ment. It was really but one of a number of forms of 
thought which were current and often incongruously com-— 
bined. We have seen that the ideas of a mystical identi- 
fication with Christ in his vicarious love, of a deliverance ~ 
from sin by an obedience and love quickened by his pas- 
sion, and of a substitutionary endurance by him of the © 


1 Op. cit., Bk. XIII. ch. xi. It should be remembered, however, that 
by ‘‘us’’? Augustine means only those who have been predestined to 
salvation by a fixed and unalterable decree. God loves only the elect — 
only those whom he has eternally chosen to salvation in Christ. This — 
fact detracts not a little from the apparent liberality of such descriptions 
of the love and graciousness of God which are declared to be antecedent 
to atonement. Calvin, as we shall see later on, quotes passages of this — 
sort from Augustine with approval, but, of course, with the same under- — 
standing of their terms. It is worth noting, however, that such writers 
do predicate an operation of the divine grace toward sinners antecedent — 
to the supposed placation of God, even if those who are to be benefited — 
by it are only an arbitrarily selected number. 

2So Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, II. 2238-239, Cf. Heb. ii, 15, 


THE COMMERCIAL THEORY OF ANSELM 141 


chastisement of our sins, were all more or less fully elabo- 
rated and applied. As respects this “military theory ” of 
a ransom paid to Satan, it is evident that it is due to un- 
warranted inferences from a figure of speech.! If God 
paid the life of Christ as a purchase price to buy man’s 
freedom, to whom, it was asked, did he pay it? Not 
to himself, it was answered; for this there was no occa- 
sion; moreover, God could not pay a price to himself. 
He must, therefore, have paid it to Satan, who was hold- 
ing man captive under his power. It has been suggested 
that the ransom theory, in this form of it, was germane to 
modes of thought prevailing in an age of brigandage, as 
Anselm’s view of a satisfaction to God’s violated personal 
honor was natural in an age of chivalry.?_ The latter, as 
we shall see, rejected entirely the notion of a compensa- 
tion to Satan and substituted that of a payment to God. 
To an exposition of this epoch-making theory let us now 
turn.® 

The aim of the treatise is to answer the question which 
constitutes its title, Cur Deus Homo? What were the 
occasion and necessity of the incarnation? It consists 
of two parts, having twenty-five and twenty-three short 
chapters respectively, and is written in the form of a So- 
eratic dialogue. The questions and difficulties are pro- 
posed by Anselm’s pupil, Boso, to whom the master makes 
answer. The first ten chapters are preliminary and are 
taken up with such topics as the relation of reason to faith, 
the congruity with reason of the virgin-birth, the com- 
pleteness of man’s ruin in sin, and the sense in which the 


1 It should be said, however, that if the popular and metaphorical lan- 
guage of Scripture is to be cast into rigid dogmatic formule, this theory 
is better justified than some of those which supplanted it, and are still 
popularly current ; for example, the death of Christ as the ‘‘ payment of 
a debt’? to God. The disappearance of this ‘“‘patristic view’’ is a 
prophecy of the fate of others which are built up by essentially the same 
method and with a similar sort of biblical basis. 

2 Ménégoz, Le Péché et la Rédemption d’aprés St. Paul, p. 239. 

3 Tn this exposition I have utilized for purposes of quotation the trans- 
lation of Cur Deus Homo ? by James G. Vose in the Bibliotheca Sacra, 
Vols. XI and XII (1854, 1855), now republished, in connection with 
other writings of Anselm, by Sidney N. Deane (Chicago, 1903). 


142 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 




























Father required the death of Christ. In chapter vy the 
argument that God might have redeemed men by means 
of some created angel or perfect man, such as Adam was, 
is answered by pointing out that redeemed men will, of 
course, belong to, and be the servants of, him who redeems 
them, and thus, in the case supposed, they would belong 
to acreated being, and not to God, which is absurd. Here 
we have one of the formative ideas of the subsequent dis 
cussion. In chapter vi Boso voices the difficulties and 
objections of unbelievers in regard to the idea of redemp 
tion in general: If God is willing to save men, what is 
hinder him from doing so directly, without the interven 
tion of aransom? In the next chapter he assails the cur 
rent solution of this question, to the effect that Satan had 
certain just rights and claims over men which God must 
discharge by payment. The master seems to acquiesce i 
his pupil’s view that while it is just for God, on account 
of man’s sin, to permit Satan to exercise a certain contre 
over man and to inflict sufferings upon him, yet he holds 
that Satan has no just rights in the case on his own account, 
and therefore, as he says afterward, God does not owe 
him anything, except punishment (II. xix), and cannot, 
therefore, pay him anything else. Finally, Boso asks if it 
does not seem incongruous with the nature of God that he 
should redeem man at such cost of labor and suffering. 
Anselm explains in answer that God himself cannot, in 
deed, suffer, but that since Christ’s person consists of twe 
natures, his humanity may suffer while his deity remains 
impassible. The next question is bolder still: How can 
a just God condemn an innocent person to suffer for the 
guilty ? Anselm replies: God, the Father, did not com- 
pel, but only permitted, his Son thus to suffer; he endured 
death voluntarily. But, rejoins Boso, do not the Serip 
tures say that in dying he obeyed the Father’s will, ful- 
filled the Father’s commandment, and drank the cup which 
the Father gave him? To this question Anselm replies 
that a distinction is to be made between what God directly 
demanded of Christ, and what he must experience because 
it lay in the path of obedience. For example: Death is 


THE COMMERCIAL THEORY OF ANSELM 143 


the penalty of sin; now God could not have required of 
Christ that he should die, for he was sinless. But Christ 
found that death was involved in the general course of his 
obedience, and accordingly he voluntarily endured it, as if 
God had commanded it. As though not wholly satisfied 
with this explanation, Anselm suggests others, for ex- 
ample: The Son must have had the will, or willingness, 
to die as a gift from the Father. Since the Father im- 
parted to him the inclination to die for men, he may prop- 
erly be said to have given him commandment to that effect, 
Again: When one does not prevent anything which he can 
prevent, he may be said to desire it. But granting all 
this, the pupil urges: How is it fitting that such a Father 
should desire the death of such a Son? Why could not 
God save men in some other way? How does the death 
of Christ avail for the salvation of men? ‘These are the 
questions to which the main argument, beginning with 
chapter x, addresses itself. 

The remainder of the First Book is occupied in develop- 
ing these six points: (1) Every creature owes obedience 
to God; this obedience is man’s debt of honor to his Sov- 
ereign. (2) Sin is the non-payment of that debt; it isa 
robbing of God, a violation of his rights and of his honor. 
(8) For this act of robbery the sinner is bound to make 
reparation. Justice demands that he shall render satis- 
faction for this affront, this violation of the rights of his 
rightful Lord. (4) Now the punishment of sin would be 
such a satisfaction; but ¢f punishment is to be remitted, 
some other satisfaction must be made which shall be an 
adequate substitute for punishment and fully meet its ends. 
(5) This satisfaction must completely balance the sin for 
which it is to satisfy; it must be as meritorious and as 
pleasing to God as sin is heinous and hateful to him. 
(6) Man is obviously powerless to render any such satis- 
faction and to discharge his own debt. I have italicized 
the keywords of the argument. 

To the question why God should not forgive out of 
mere compassion upon repentance and return to obedi- 
ence, Anselm replies that by sin man has not only robbed 


144. THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE a 


God of his due, but has offended against his honor. T1 
reparation must therefore be more than an equivalent fo 
the sin, considered in the former aspect. It must con 
pensate not only for the deprivation but for the affront 
Now a mere return to obedience would not do that. I 
would leave God’s honor unrequited. There would stil 
be a debt unpaid—the debt due to his offended dignity 
“and this it is impious even to think of.” To this argt 
ment Boso responds, “ I think that nothing more reason 
able can be said” (I. xiii). But difficulties still remain 
How would punishment preserve God’s honor? and 
Why has God allowed his honor to be violated, even i; 
the slightest degree, by sin? Anselm replies that punish 
ment is God’s way of collecting his debts by force. 
return for what man stole from him, God by punishmer 
takes from man that to which he has a natural right 
namely, happiness and every good, and thus accounts are 
evened. ‘Placet quod dicis,” responds Boso. The see: 
ond difficulty is met in a characteristic way. In an ea 
. lier chapter (ix), Anselm is at pains to show how Got 
may be spoken of as if he required Christ’s death, althoug 
the fact was that he only permitted it or imparted te 
Christ the inclination voluntarily to submit to it. hi 
that connection he explains that what oceurs post hoe ma 
properly be spoken of as if it occurred propter hoc; fo: 
example: Christ is said in Scripture to have been exalted 
propter mortem, though the fact was that his exaltatio: 
was post mortem, “just as (he continues) our Lord was 
said to have increased in wisdom, and in favor with God ; 
not that this was really the case, but that he deportec 
himself as if it were so” (ille sic se habebat, ac si it 
esset). In like manner he now declares that God was not 
really robbed of his honor at all by sin; but that ma 
having made an effort to rob him, is treated as if he ha 
done so. ‘No one can honor or dishonor God, as he is 
in himself; but the creature, as far as he is concerned 
appears to do this when he submits or opposes his will to 
the will of God.” “ Satisfecisti objectioni meae,” responds 
Boso. 















THE COMMERCIAL THEORY OF ANSELM 145 


The next three chapters (xvi—xviil) are a digression in 
which the master finds a motive for the redemption of 
men in the desire of God to recruit the depleted ranks of 
the angels. The places of the fallen angels must be filled ; 
these doomed spirits cannot be recovered to holiness; 
hence their number can only be made good by the salva- 
tion of men. This idea seems, however, to involve the 
result that only just enough men will be saved to fill the 
yacant places; but Anselm presents a number of reasons, 
satisfactory to Boso, for thinking that God did not origi- 
nally create all the angels which he intended to have. 
According to this view, the possible number of redeemed 
men may well be far larger than that of the fallen spirits, 
so that the original number created may not only be made 
good, but indefinitely increased by the salvation of men. 
The pupil expresses special gratitude for this demonstra- 
tion which, according to the terms of the agreement, he 
had no right to expect. He is sure that the Lord loves 
such a “cheerful giver” as his master is proving himself 
to be in doing more than he promised. The discussion 
now returns to the point formerly made, that if sin is to 
be forgiven, a satisfaction must be made. A number of 
syllogisms are constructed to prove this, but they all rest, 
at last, on the assertion that the contrary would not be 
fitting (non decet). Boso declares that he could not 
doubt the proposition even if he were so disposed. 

If, then, a satisfaction is to be made, it must be ade- 
quate — proportionate to the guilt of sin. Once more 
the pupil suggests that contrition, self-denial, abstinence, 
toils, and loving service to men might suffice, and reminds 
the master of the unconditional promise that he who 
turns from his wickedness shall live. But Anselm an- 
swers that all the good deeds and services mentioned by 
him are due in justice to God, and that though one pays 
them all, he does not thereby diminish in the least the 
sum of his back debts; the guilt of his past sin remains 
entirely uncancelled. As to the promise of forgiveness 
upon condition of repentance, it is declared to be applicable 
only to those who looked forward to Christ or to those 
















146 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


who believe on him since his coming. All such assw 
ances are conditioned upon satisfaction for sin. Conside 
further, continues Anselm, how great a debt sin incur 
Suppose that God commanded you to look in one direc 
tion, would you be justified in looking in the opposit 
direction, even if the salvation of your soul and the pres 
ervation of the universe itself depended upon it? 
course not, answers Boso. If, then, the slightest sin is s 
enormous, how hopeless is it for man to think of discharg 
ing his debt to God. This impossibility is now demor 
strated. What would be required in order to pay thé 
debt is that, as man in his strength and vigor yielded 
the devil and sinned, incurring thus the penalty of deatl 
so now in his weakness and mortality he should conque 
the devil by the pain of death, without sin. But in th 
moral impotence of his sinful state this is obviously im 
possible. Man, then, is utterly bankrupt. The homag 
which he can render to God by repentance, self-denial, an 
good works are no equivalent to his debt. Moreover, hi 
sin renders him powerless to retrace the steps of his fall 


to which Book First conducts us: Man cannot be save 
without full payment of the debt which his robbery o 
God incurred; but he himself is powerless to diminish i 
in the least; he can barely meet running expenses, to sa} 
nothing of discharging obligations created by past sin. 

A concise summary of the main points developed 
Book Second may aid the exposition: (1) It has bee 
proved that man is utterly powerless to make the satisfaction 
required for sin. (2) God himself must make it if it is 
made at all; he alone can make it. (3) But it is due from 
man, not from God; man ought to make it, but God alone 
can; hence the necessity, if it is to be made, of a God- 
man. (4) This God-man has given to God his own life a 
a satisfaction for sin. This he was not under obligation 
to do; obedience he owed, but the yielding up of his ¢ 
was a free gift. (5) Now as the guilt of even the least sit 


THE COMMERCIAL THEORY OF ANSELM 147 








o utweighs all worlds — everything not God, — so the life of 
Ohrist surpasses in value all worlds and creatures and is 
more valuable than sin is heinous ; hence it is an adequate 
equivalent and balances the account in man’s favor. (6) 
Now such a gift calls for a reward. The saved are the 
reward which God makes to Christ for his gift of his life. 
Here, too, I have italicized the words on which the argu- 



















ment chiefly turns 

A more particular account of the discussion is as 
follows: Man was made holy in order that he might be 

ppy- Moreover, had he never sinned, he would never 
lave died. These facts prove, by the way, that there 
must be a resurrection, that is, a restoration of the saved 
0 the original perfection of humanity. Now we have 
een that God can accomplish this restoration only on 
pndition of a satisfaction for sin. But now, interposes 
» you seem to have grounded man’s salvation on a 
ine necessity, rather than on grace, — to which Anselm 
Teplies that it is a necessity which God has freely imposed 
upon himself. The work of salvation flows from his un- 
ngeable goodness, and the conditions and manner of 
it are prescribed by his immutable honor. 

Now no gift to God is adequate to satisfy for sin which 
$ not greater and more valuable than all things, save God 
imself (majus quam omne quod preter Deum est — 
omne quod non est Deus), and the giver of it must 

greater than all things, aside from God himself. It is 
vident that God alone can meet these conditions, and 
yet the payment demanded is due from man. Hence the 
wer to our question: Cur Deus Homo? Man owes the 
debt; God alone can pay it. If, therefore, it is to be paid 
at all, God must become man. But how can this be? 
er explaining a number of ways in which it cannot be 
(by sketching the various heretical views of Christ’s person), 
Anselm declares, with no effort at explanation, that it is 
imply necessary for the purpose in view that the Saviour 
puld be One who is both very God and very man — each 
ature being complete, and the two united entire, in one 
arson. “ Totum mihi placet, quod dicis,” responds Boso. 





























148 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


He next proves that in order to pay man’s debt tl 
Saviour must be one of the race of men, and contends 


all our evils and woes upon us. Then follow reasons wh 
the Son only, of the persons of the Trinity, could becom 
incarnate. These are based upon the baldest Tritheis 
and read like a fragment of mythological genealogy. 
Christ, then, did not deserve to die; his life could ne 
be exacted of him as a debt, for he was sinless and divine 
Now, inquires Boso, if he is God, could he sin? Yes an 
no, replies Anselm. He could sin, if he chose to, but h 
could not choose to sin, therefore he could not sin. Bui 
answers Boso, if he could not sin, had his virtue, the 
any moral worth? But, asks the master in reply, do w 
not praise God for his holiness, though we know that h 
cannot sin? Inability to sin does not invalidate tl 
worth of goodness. Well, then, urges Boso, why did ne 
God make man incapable of sin and thus secure his goo¢ 
ness and happiness and save him from all the evil a 
suffering caused by sin? This inquiry Anselm pronoune 
positively irreverent, and he deigns only the brief reply 
Because, in that case, God would have made man equal t 
himself, which is preposterous. “I blush to have asked th 
question,” says Boso. 
Now, as has been shown, Christ’s death was not owed t 
God, for he was sinless; and only those deserve to di 
who have sinned. It rested with him as omnipotent Goc 
to give or to withhold his life. The gift of it, therefore 
was something over and above the requirement of obedience 
It was a gift to the honor of the Father which the So 
did not owe asa debt. In this connection Anselm tal 
occasion to refute the objection that, if Christ share 
our weaknesses, he must have been both miserable an 
ignorant. He was not miserable, is the argument, becaus 
there is no misery in bearing a loss which one ass 
willingly, and he could not have been ignorant because il 
assuming humanity God will take only such elements o 
it as are seemly and useful, and ignorance would m 


THE COMMERCIAL THEORY OF ANSELM 149 


have been an advantage, but a hindrance, to his saving 
work. 

We have seen that the slightest sin against God out- 
weighs all other possible or conceivable evils. Something 
of infinite value is therefore required to balance the least 
sin. Now the gift of Christ’s life is of this character; it is 
more amiable than sin is odious. It is able even to cancel 
the sin of his murderers, since it was in ignorance that they 
put him to death. Here arise two other questions: Can 
Christ’s death save even Adam and Eve? and: How could 
he be sinless when born of a sinful mother? Anselm 
answers that many must have been saved before Christ’s 
coming by a retroactive effect of his death, for otherwise it 
is quite inconceivable that the depleted ranks of the angels, 
which must be made good by the salvation of men, should 
have been recruited. Doubtless Adam and Eve were 
among those thus saved, for we cannot suppose that there 
was ever a time when the world was so unprofitable as to 
contain no human being who had gained the object for 
which he was made. As to the second question, it is 
answered that the virgin Mary was cleansed from sin by 
faith in her son before his birth, and so he was born in 
purity. Since, then, his mother’s purity was from himself, 
it was really his own.! 

Did the God-man, then, die from necessity? No; for 
he had the power to withhold his life, even though he could 
not wish to do so—just as he had power to lie, though 
his disposition which arises from himself infallibly pre- 
vented him from choosing to lie. Moreover, as God, he 
could be moved by no necessity. As it would not be 
power, but weakness, for God to wish to lie (whence its 
impossibility), so it would not be power, but weakness, 
for Christ to desire to withhold his life when once the pur- 
pose of salvation had been formed, and in view of the great 
good to be wrought by the gift of it. The pupil now sum- 


1 Tt will be remembered that the doctrine of the immaculate concep- 
tion of the virgin, that is, of her freedom from the taint of original sin, 
did not become an official dogma of the Roman Catholic Church until 
1854. 






















150 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


marizes what he considers to have been proved thus far: 
“By numerous and positive reasons you have shown that 
the restoration of mankind ought not to take place, and 
could not, unless man paid the debt which he owed 
God for his sin. And this debt was so great that, while 
none but man was bound to discharge it, none but God 
could do so; so that he who does it must be both God 
and man. And hence arises a necessity that God should 
take man into unity with his own person, so that he who 
in his own nature was bound to pay the debt, but could 
not, might be able to do it in his character as God. In 
fine, you have shown that that man, who was also God, 
must be formed from the virgin, and from the person of 
the Son of God, and that he could be taken without sin, 
though from a sinful substance. Moreover, you have 
clearly shown the life of this man to have been so excel- 
lent and so glorious as to make ample satisfaction for the 
sins of the whole world, and even infinitely more.” 1 

The final question is: How does the offering of Christ’s 
life avail for salvation? It is a great gift to God’s honor 
Does it not then deserve a reward? But how can a re 
ward be bestowed upon the Son of God himself who has 
need of nothing? Clearly the deserved recompense must 
be given to some one else, and to whom could it be so fitly 
given as to man for whose benefit Christ came to give his 
life as a satisfaction? This is our author’s philosophy of 
salvation: It is the gift to man of the reward which Christ 
had merited by the payment of his life. Anselm denies 
the view long current, that this price is paid to the devil, 
for God owed the devil nothing but punishment, nor does 
man ever owe him anything except to conquer him 
Whatever debts man owes, he owes to God, not to the 
devil. 

Now, at last, declares Anselm, the compassion of God, 
which seemed lost out of sight while we were discussing 
God’s holiness and man’s sin, comes clearly into view as 
the motive and explanation of God’s whole purpose and 
plan of salvation. The discussion closes with * infallible 


1 Ch. xviii, a. 














THE COMMERCIAL THEORY OF ANSELM 151 


fs” that Satan can never be saved, and with the con- 
on of Boso that the solution of the one chief question 
issue has thrown a flood of light upon the whole Bible, 
which the master replies, “If we have said anything 
t needs correction, I am willing to make the correction, 
E it be a reasonable one.” 
_ Sim, then, according to Anselm, is a violation of God’s 
private rights, an affront to his infinite honor and majesty. 
‘The atonement is an act of homage to God of such tran- 
scendent value as to outweigh the sins of mankind and to 
make it right and proper for God to forgive them. These 
conceptions remained dominant during the scholastic 
period. There were, indeed, variations from them. 
Thomas Aquinas held that the method of salvation de- 
pended entirely upon the divine will. God might have 
saved man without any satisfaction, though he maintains 
that the mode of redemption chosen was the most suitable. 
[ Scotus departs much farther from Anselm and 
declares that the merits of Christ’s work depend entirely 
a7 the divine will in accepting it; God might as well 
lave saved man through the acts of Adam or of an angel 
had he chosen to do so. 
Several times, in the course of his treatise, Anselm refers 
to the necessity that sins should be punished ; but it is 
evident that his meaning is that they must either be pun- 
ished or adequately satisfied and atoned for.! It is clear 
from his whole exposition that the satisfaction wrought 
by Christ is not contemplated as punishment, but as a 
‘Substitute for punishment. Here is the point at which 
the Reformation and post-Reformation theology diverged 


. 














1¥or example, in Bk. I. ch. xii., he says, ‘“*It is not proper for God 
thus to pass over sin unpunished,”’ that is, to forgive it unconditionally, 
as he explains farther on : “‘to let the sinner go unpunished, who makes 
no return to God of what he has defrauded him.” But this return has 
een made, of course, in Christ’s payment of his life. Amnselm’s doctrine 
Snot that of an unconditional divime necessity to punish ; God may ac- 
and does accept, an equivalent act of payment or homage in place 
punishment. Anselm’s view is not properly a penal satisfaction 
FY, as it is sometimes represented, e.g. in Strong’s Systematic Theol- 
ly, pp. 407, 408. 


152 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


























from Anselm and from the medieval theology in genera 
The Reformers appear to have narrowed the question re 
garding the saving benefits of Christ’s death by consider: 
ing not so much its general necessity and grounds, as its 
specific relation to forgiveness. Sin is viewed as a viola 
tion of God’s inexorable law, and not merely as an affront 
to his honor. The necessity which now arises is not 
merely a necessity to vindicate his majesty; it is the 
necessity that sin be punished. It is no longer a ques- 
tion of God’s dignity or honor, but of his inflexible justice, 
It is no longer, as with Anselm, a question of satisfac 
tion or punishment, but of satisfaction by punishment. 
If, therefore, sin is to be forgiven, it must, first of all, be 
punished. These are the postulates of the Reformation 
doctrine, and it is apparent that they involve not merely ¢ 
modification, but a transformation, of the theory of A 
selm.! Some of the forerunners of the Reformation had 
held similar views. Wyclif, in explaining why God 
would not remit sin without a satisfaction, says that “ his 
justice would not suffer it, but requires that each trespass 
be punished, either on earth or in hell.” Wessel declare 
that “ Christ is not only the Mediator between God and 
man, but is rather a Mediator for man between the God o! 
justice and the God of mercy.” 

In citing the opinions of Luther, some allowance must 
doubtless be made for his vehemence and rhetorical extray- 
agance. He frequently describes Christ as suffering the 
penal consequences of the world’s sin, represents him as 
standing in the sinner’s place, and enduring the equivalent 
of his punishment. In his comment on Gal. iii. 13, he 
says that “God laid on Christ the sins of all men, saying 
to him: Be thou Peter, that denier; Paul, that persecutor, 
blasphemer, and cruel oppressor; David, that adulterer; 
that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise; that thie 
which hanged upon the cross; and, in short, be thou the 
person which hath committed the sins of all men.” In 


1 Cf. Ritschl, A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justif- 
cation and Reconciliation, pp. 196-203; Dale, Atonement, pp. 285-294 
Lidgett, The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement, pp. 463-474. 


THE COMMERCIAL THEORY OF ANSELM 153 


connection with 2 Cor. v. 21, he declares that Christ 
chose to be of all men “the greatest robber, murderer,” 
etc., “a sinner who bears the sin” of men, and adds: 
“Should any one say, It is extremely absurd and irrever- 
ent to call the Son of God a sinner and accursed, I reply, 
If you wish to deny that he is a sinner and accursed, deny 
also that he suffered, was crucified and dead. For it is 
not less absurd to say that the Son of God was crucified, 
bore the penalties of sin and death, than to say that he 
was a sinner and accursed. If, indeed, it is not absurd to 
confess and believe that Christ was crucified between rob- 
bers, neither is it absurd to say that he was accursed and 
a sinner of sinners.” But expressions like these must be 
balanced by Luther’s mysticism and by his strong asser- 
tions of the divine love. It may well be doubted whether 
even this language, apparently descriptive of an external 
substitution and imputation, may not have had for its au- 
thor a mystical sense ; whether Christ’s bearing of our sins 
was not primarily to Luther’s thought a matter of inner 
spiritual experience, a carrying of the cross in his heart. 
Calvin is more guarded in his language. He raises the 
question how God could have become reconciled to us in 
Christ “unless he had already embraced us in gratuitous 
favor.” To this he answers, in part, that the biblical lan- 
guage about reconciliation “is accommodated to our sense 
in order that we may better understand how miserable 
1 Ritschl declares: ‘‘ Luther surpassed all previous theology when he 
brought love into prominence as the character which exhaustively ex- 
presses the Christian idea of God; and in this fundamental conception 
of God he recognizes also the ultimate determining motive for the redemp- 
tion and reconciliation of the sinner that were wrought by Christ. How- 
ever strongly he may insist upon God’s wrath against sinners, however 
emphatically he may proclaim Christ’s vicarious punishment as the means 
of appeasing it, his meaning is never that God’s relation to sinful man 
has previously resolved itself wholly into one of wrath; that in that 
wrath his love had ceased, and could be reawakened only by the merits 
of Christ.... His true opinion is essentially that God’s love as the 
ultimate motive of the sinner’s redemption is the superior determination 
of his will, while penal justice or wrath is considered as the subordinate 
motive of his action in carrying out the work of redemption.’’ History, 


p. 201. See, further, Dorner, Lehre von der Person Christi, Il. 513 sq. ; 
Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement, ch. ii. 































154 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


and calamitous is our condition out of Christ,” though he 
does not mean by this that it is not “strictly true.” He 
also speaks of God as reconciling us to himself “ by abol- 
ishing whatever of evil is in us,” and says that Christ does 
this by “the whole course of his obedience.” Calvin’s 
exposition is more like that of Augustine than it is like that 
of Luther. The work of redemption flows from God’s 
love, and the necessity of it is grounded rather in a divine 
decree than in an immediate requirement of distributive 
justice. Still, there was in God’s holiness an obstacle 
to forgiveness. God was angry at man as a sinner, even 
though he discovered something in him —his kinship to 
himself — that his goodness might love. With Augustine 
he holds that “in a wonderful and divine manner he both 
hated and loved us at the same time.” “In this situation, 
Christ took upon himself and suffered the punishment 
which by the righteous judgment of God impended over 
all sinners, and by this expiation the Father has been 
satisfied and his wrath appeased.” ! 

This penal satisfaction theory was developed and elabo- 
rated by the post-Reformation divines of the seventeenth 
century, that period of Protestant scholasticism and hyper- 


1 Institutes, Bk. II. ch. xvi. §§ 3, 4. Calvin constantly uses expression: 
like these: ‘‘ Christ suffered the punishment of our sin and so satisfied 
the justice of God’; he ‘‘ appeased God’’; ‘reconciled God”; ** ap- 
peased the wrath of God’’; ‘‘rendered the Father favorable and pro- 
pitious.’’ He declares that ‘‘God was angry with us and must be 
appeased by a satisfaction’’; that ‘‘God was our enemy till he was 
reconciled to us by Christ’”’; that ‘‘on Christ’s righteous person was 
inflicted the punishment which belonged to us’’; that ‘*the guilt which 
made us obnoxious to punishment is transferred to him’; and that ‘he 
felt the severity of the divine vengeance.’’ He interprets the article oj 
the creed: ‘‘He descended into hell,’? to mean that ‘*he suffered that 
death which the wrath of God inflicts on transgressions”? and ‘“ endured 
in his soul the dreadful torments of a person condemned and irretriev. 
ably lost.’’ Still Calvin insists with Augustine that God loved us before 
Christ placated him, and that he was moved by his ‘‘ pure and gratuitous 
love,’’ which ‘‘ precedes our reconciliation in Christ,’ to plan and exe 
cute this appeasement of his wrath. Nor does he attribute salvation 
solely to the death of Christ, but also, in part, to his * whole life,’ 
though this idea is not developed. He is also at pains to explain tha’ 
God was not personally hostile to or angry with Christ. His ‘ punish- 
ment ’’ was due to official, judicial necessity. II. xvii, passim. 


a 


THE COMMERCIAL THEORY OF ANSELM 155 


orthodoxy. It rested upona certain view of the justice of 
God. He must punish. His relation to the sinner is not 
that of private ownership or personal sovereignty; neither 
has he any choice of ways or means in dealing with sin. Re- 
tributive justice —the principle of guid pro quo —is pri- 
mary and fundamental in his being and must express itself 
in penalty. Hence sin cannot be forgiven until it has first 
been punished.! This is the view which is elaborated by 
Turretin, Mastricht, Gerhard, and Quenstedt. For ex- 
ample, Gerhard writes: ‘“ Christ in the time of his passion 
and death, but especially in the garden at the foot of 
Mount Olivet, when he sweated blood, experienced in his 
most holy soul the bitterest tortures, griefs, terrors, and 
truly infernal anguish, and so thoroughly experienced the 
wrath of God, the curse of the law, and the penalties of 
hell. For how could he have truly taken our sins upon 
himself, and afforded a perfect satisfaction, unless he had 
truly felt the wrath of God, conjoined by an inseparable 
connection (individuo nexu) with sin? How could he 
have redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a 
curse for us, unless he had fully experienced the judgment 
of an angry God (nisi judicium Dei irati persensisset)?” ? 
Quenstedt declares that ‘“‘ Christ was substituted in the 
place of the debtors,” and that “in his satisfaction he 
sustained all that the rigor of God’s justice demanded, so 
much so that he felt even the very pains of hell, although 
not in hell or eternally.” 

We shall have occasion to return to this type of thought 
as it has been illustrated by more recent writers. The 
point to be noted here is, how wide a departure it is from 
the theory of Anselm. It took its rise, no doubt, in mod- 
ifications of Anselm’s view, but it has become a widely 


1‘ Melanchthon makes God’s forensic punishment-demanding justice 
to be the fundamental conception (in the idea of God) —justice which 
can be turned into grace only by means of the sacrifice of Christ. He 
therefore is the true author of the subsequent orthodox doctrine.’’ 
Ritschl, History, p. 202. 

2 Loci theologici, Locus XVII, De causa meritoria justificationis, cap. 
li. § 54. 

3 Theologia Didactico-polemica, I. 39. 















156 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


different theory, “ the precise antithesis,” as Dr. Dale says, 
“of the conception in the Cur Deus Homo.” } 


1 Dale thus expresses the difference between the views of Anselm and 
those of Luther: ‘‘ Anselm, though not with unvarying consistency, rep- 
resents the voluntary submission of Christ to death as a transcendent 
act of righteousness and of devotion to the honour of God, and maintains | 
that God rewarded Christ by forgiving the sins of men. Luther repre- 
sents the death of Christ as the endurance of the suffering due to the 
sins of our race, On Anselm’s theory, Christ has secured our salvation 
because in his death he clothed himself with the glory of a unique right- 
eousness, for which God rewards him. On Luther’s theory, Christ 
secured our salvation because in his death he clothed himself with the 
sins of the human race, so that God inflicted on him the sufferings which 
the sins of the race had deserved. The theological distance between the 
theories can hardly be measured. They are alike only in this, that they 
both affirm that the death of Christ is the ground on which our sins are 
forgiven.” The Atonement, p. 290. 


CHAPTER II 
THE GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF GROTIUS 


THE treatise of the distinguished Dutch jurist, Hugo 
Grotius (1583-1645), on the Satisfaction of Christ, was 
written in refutation of the theory of Socinianism. This 
theory was elaborated by Lelius Socinus (1525-1562) 
and, more fully, by his nephew, Faustus Socinus (1539- 
1604), and found expression in the manifesto of the Polish 
Unitarians called the Racovian Catechism, published in 
1605. The system included an acute and radical criticism 
of the orthodox theory of atonement. Its chief exponent, 
Faustus Socinus, took common ground with Anselm in 
viewing sin as a violation of private right, and from this 
conception derived the conclusion that it is competent for 
God to pardon an affront to his majesty, without satisfac- 
tion, if he chooses. This was a conclusion which the 
principles of Anselm were powerless to exclude; the Re- 
formers and post-Reformation divines, however, had fore- 
stalled it by their definition of justice. According to 
chem, justice meant the necessity to punish sin ; hence the 
possibility of forgiveness without a satisfaction, and, in- 
leed, a penal satisfaction, was out of the question. Soci- 
aus challenged this definition of justice. He declared 
that God’s justice is a name for his fairness and equitable- 
1ess. What the orthodox called justice, that is, the de- 
ermination to punish, is, like mercy, an effect of the divine 

ill, and may be exercised or not, at God’s option. It 
vill be noticed that Socinus related distributive justice to 
he divine will in the same way as orthodoxy related mercy 
hereto ; in either case it was declared to be optional with 
od to exercise it or not; in principle, the two extremes 
net. On this basis Socinus confuted the orthodox theory 
157 







158 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 
















thus: The penalty of sin is eternal death ; now if it | 
true that God must punish all sin, then every sinner mu 
inevitably suffer eternal death; divine justice would r 
quire that all men should perish. The alleged transfer ¢ 
man’s punishment to an innocent person is impossible 
God’s law is, “ The soul that sinneth, 7¢ shall die.” | 
notion of penal substitution, even if it were not inherently 
absurd, would require that the substitute should suffer 
eternal death, the ordained penalty of sin, and it 
acknowledged that Christ did not suffer this penal 
But even if he had done so, he would have satisfied fi 
but one person, since he could suffer but one eternal dea’ 
Moreover, on the orthodox view of his person, he could 
not suffer at all, since God is impassible. His obedient 
cannot have been a satisfaction for our sins since he owe 
obedience to God on his own account; but even if he 
could have made satisfaction by his obedience, he would 
have satisfied for but one person. By such considerations 
Socinus sought to show that forgiveness and satisfactic 
are incompatible ideas. If God must and does satisi 
strict retributive justice by punishing all sin, then there is 
no logical place or possibility of forgiveness; if, on the 
contrary, God does forgive the sins of some men, then it 
is certain that he does not strictly punish all sin with # 
doom of eternal death. If, according to the favorite figure 
of orthodoxy, Christ has fully paid the debt of the worl 
sin, then there remains nothing more to be paid; God 
cannot justly exact its payment again in the punishmel 
of a portion of mankind. But, in point of fact, while o 
debts may be paid by others, our penalties never can. 
All examples of “ vicarious punishment” presuppose some 
implication of the victim in the guilt expiated. Agai 
The satisfaction scheme requires no faith to make it va 
for if it did, then the alleged satisfaction would not 
complete. 

Taking up the scriptural references to the subject 
Socinus points out that the terms “ransom” and “re 
demption by the blood of Christ” are figures of speec 
The statement that Christ died for our sins may mean tl 


ae 


THE GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF GROTIUS 159 


our sins were the occasion of his death, or that he died to 
win us from the commission of sin. He “bore our sins” 
in the sense that he took them away from us by inciting 
us to abandon them. ‘The notions of substitution and ex- 
piation cannot be legitimately deduced from the sacrificial 
terms which Christianity borrowed from Judaism, since the 
Old Testament sacrificial victims were not sin-bearing nor 
their death substituted for the death of the offerers. If, 
then, under the Old Testament system, God forgave the 
sins of men without a satisfaction, he can do so now, and 
always. Men are required to forgive unconditionally 
“until seventy times seven times” (Mt. xviii. 21, 22), 
and cannot God do as much? In the Church doctrine 
Socinus finds (on its own principles) a double immorality : 
(1) in letting the guilty go unpunished; and (2) in 
punishing the innocent. 

Our purpose does not require us to discuss these 
objections to the current orthodoxy, but it is evident from 
their mere statement that they constitute a formidable 
challenge. They assail the forensic interpretation of 
salvation and show to what contradictions and impossibil- 
ities it leads when consistently carried out. Socinus 
borrowed the merciless logic of his opponents and showed 
to what intolerable results it led. This was legitimate 
controversy ; and yet there was an element of unfairness 
involved init. The Reformers’ doctrine of atonement was 
a corollary and support to their doctrine of justification 
by faith, and, in point of fact, they did not carry out this 
latter doctrine in amerely forensic way. Justification and 
imputation were always something more than proceedings 
in bookkeeping, though the excessive use of juridical 
analogies often gave them the appearance of being little 
else. Again: Socinus’s view of retributive justice has 
the same Scotian defect as his opponents’ view of grace ; 
it tends to weaken the essential ethical character of God 
on the side of his rectitude, as the orthodox view tends 
to weaken it on the side of his love. If the latter view of 
justice makes it a kind of natural necessity, the former 
grounds it in an arbitrary freedom. But as against the 

























7 ® 


160 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 
post-Reformation inconsistency which made justice a kint 
of natural attribute of God and then Gn the method 
Scotus) hinged the exercise of mercy upon the operation 
of the divine will, the position of Socinus, that compassion 
was as essential in God as retributive justice, was impreg- 
nable. But it was on the question of the “ punishment of 
the innocent” that Socinus pressed his opponents hardest. 
Deserting the conception of Anselm that sin is a violation 
of private right, on which the defence of their case woule 
have been obviously hopeless, they took up the positiot 
that sin is a violation of public law and, as such, must bh 
punished. This is a maxim of criminal procedure. Buw 
now if sin is to be remitted, it is obvious that its penalty 
cannot be inflicted upon the persons of those who com 
mitted it, but only upon the head of a substituted victim. 
The procurement of this victim could only be explainec 
by appeal to the analogies of civil law which allows th 
substitution of a surety, as where one man pays 
debt of another. But this is to fall back again upor 
the discarded notion of sin as a violation of private right 
Thus the defence vacillated between conceptions of pri 
vate right and public necessity, criminal and civil law 
shifting from one ground to another, until, at length, i 
the persons of its later representatives, it abandoned 
effort at rational defence and took refuge in the naked 
authority of Scripture, and even, in some cases, admittec 
that justice in God and justice in man must be funda. 
mentally different. We shall see when we come to con 
sider more particularly the penal satisfaction scheme of 
seventeenth-century dogmaticians how fond they are o 
the figure of sin as a debt and atonement as its payment. 
That figure serves a double purpose: It lends itself to th 
support of the idea of a precise equivalence between the ° 
sufferings of Christ and the penalty due to sin, and i 
serves to shift the ground of defence from the standpoin 
of criminal law assumed in the initial definitions, to the 
of civil law, and so of concealing the real inconsistency i 
which the argument is involved. The theory desert 
Anselm’s definitions, but seeks to keep under cover of h 


THE GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF GROTIUS 161 


arguments. In other words, the necessity of a strict pun- 
ishment of sin (in criminal law) is first asserted, and then 
a figurative “ punishment” of it (on the analogy of a debt 
under civil law) is proven to have occurred. 

One further remark may be added: The penal satis- 
faction theory, following in this a suggestion of Anselm, 
was accustomed to make use of the idea of Christ’s 
infinity as a means of balancing the equation between his 
sufferings and human guilt. But, as we shall have occa- 
sion to see, these mere quantitative relations were more or 
less clearly felt to be incongruous and inapplicable to such 
concepts as those of suffering and sin. They could satisfy 
only the most mechanical, and really superficial, thinking. 
In so far as they did not satisfy, the alleged equivalence 
had to be made out by a virtual appeal to what Duns 
Scotus called acceptatio, that is, the gracious acceptance 
of Christ’s sufferings as satisfactory to the mind of God. 
This was, indeed, deemed a heresy, or a very deficient 
orthodoxy; yet we find Anselm falling back upon this 
idea in hinging the satisfaction at last upon God’s good 
pleasure in willing and accepting it, and we shall have 
occasion to observe how modern representatives of the 
theory are sometimes constrained to resort to it.? 

But we must turn without further delay to the exposi- 
tion of Grotius. His treatise purports to be a defence of 
the Catholic or Church doctrine against the objections 
of Faustus Socinus. Grotius accordingly makes free use 
of the current terminology in which the prevailing theory 
was expressed. He speaks of Christ “paying” or “suf- 
fering the penalty of our sins,” “receiving our punish- 
ment,” and “being chastised, that is, punished.” He 
declares that since death is the ordained punishment of 


1 Ritschl shows how, in earlier times, the theory was driven to this 
cover: ‘‘ However much, therefore, the orthodox are confident that 
Christ’s penal suffering corresponds to the strictest justice, —in the case 
of many, such as Amesius and Maresius, the Scotist word acceptatio 
occurs as an indication of an involuntary impression that God, by an 
act of equity rather than strict justice, must constitute the equivalence, 
demanded by the premisses, between Christ’s satisfaction and the law’s 
demand for punishment.’ History, p. 308. 


162 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 




























sin, “it can by no means be doubted that with referene 
to God the suffering and death of Christ had the char- 
acter of a punishment.” 1 He does not hesitate to spez 
of the blood of Christ as “ propitiating God,” and says that 
by his death “ God is appeased and reconciled to us.”2 His 
general definition of the Catholic doctrine is as follows? 
““God was moved by his own goodness to bestow distin: 
guished blessings upon us. But since our sins, which 
deserved punishment, were an obstacle to this, he dete 
mined that Christ, being willing of his own love toward 
men, should, by bearing the most severe tortures, and a 
bloody and ignominious death, pay the penalty for our sins, 
in order that without prejudice to the exhibition of the 
divine justice, we might be liberated, upon the interven: 
tion of a true faith, from the punishment of eternal death.’ 

The Defence exhibits that subtlety in analysis, acute- 
ness in rebuttal, and ample learning which we should 
expect to find in the trained jurist. The argument is 
fortified by scriptural considerations, by historical exam- 
ples, and by appeal to the ethical judgments of mankind, 
But it is noticeable that the principles and practices of 
heathenism seem quite as acceptable to Grotius as biblica 
texts, and certainly they often serve the purposes of h 
theory quite as well. For example, he supports the affir 
mation “that it is not unjust, or contrary to the nature 
of punishment, that one should be punished for another's 
sins” (p. 82) mainly by appeal to heathen ethics, reén- 
forced by some Old Testament incidents. In vain, he 
declares, does Socinus cite Deut. xxiv. 16: “ The fathers 
shall not be put to death for the children, neithe: 
shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every 
man shall be put to death for his own sin”; that is a 
mere positive law which God can repeal as easily as he 
enacted it; “*God is not bound by it.” The essence of 
punishment is infliction on account of sin; “it is not 
essential that it should be inflicted upon the sinner him- 


1 Foster’s translation (Andover, 1889), p. 82. The value of this edi- 
tion is enhanced by a historical introduction and critical notes. 
2 Op. cit., p. 50. 8 Op. cit., pp. 1, 2. 


eg 


THE GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF GROTIUS 163 


self” (p. 88); “nothing prevents that it should be or- 
dained as punishment for another’s sin” (p. 89). To 
establish this Christian principle Grotius introduces a long 
procession of heathen moralists who have approved it 
in theory or in practice, — Plutarch, Valerius Maximus, 
Hesiod, Ulpian, Caius, and a number of other authorities, 
—Greek, Roman, and Persian. In like manner in chap- 
ter x the proof that “God is induced by victims not to 
punish sin” (p. 192) is derived, in the first instance, 
from the sacrificial system of the Old Testament and the 
echoes of it in the New, but is mainly supported by the 
testimony of a score or more of heathen writers. These 
are regarded as competent witnesses on the ground that 
heathen sacrifices were imposed by natural law, as the 
Jewish system was authorized by specific statute. In 
this array appear the Canaanites, who “were accustomed 
to placate Moloch by the slaughter of their own free 
citizens,” and the Tyrians, “among whom it was an 
ancient custom to immolate to Saturn a free-born youth” 
(p. 207). These and similar examples “afford no little 
help in understanding the nature of expiatory sacrifice ” 
(p. 212). Now “sacrifice consists in slaying” (p. 221), 
and the history of religion, biblical and profane, shows 
that by the slaughter of victims, animal and human, God 
ig propitiated. “Socinus denies that God is placated 
by expiatory sacrifices ; but the writers above cited by us 
prove the contrary, inasmuch as they employ the word 
placate1 to express those sacred rites. Hence arose that 
phrase employed in the passage quoted from Hebrews, to 
expiate sins (ihacKxecOat aduaprtias), that is, to atone for 
sin by placating God” (p. 218). 

These phrases and arguments sound sufficiently ortho- 
dox, and such they were doubtless intended to be; yet 
the keen dogmaticians of the time scented heresy in Gro- 
tius, and not without reason. The voice was the voice of 
Jacob; but the hands were the hands of Esau. The heresy 


1 Of course the examples cited of the phrase, to placate God, are all 
from heathen sources, as it is not a biblical phrase. See my Johannine 
Theology, pp. 182-184, 


164. THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 




















lay partly in what was not said and partly in an unusu 
use of words. It was apparent to one who read betwe 
the lines. Let us note some of the points of divergene 
from current theory. 
We have seen that Anselm regarded the attitude of Go 
toward sin as that of an offended party whose honor must 
be vindicated, and that the Reformation theology viewe 
him as the inexorable avenger who must punish men fe 
the infraction of his law. The view of Grotius differe 
from both. He conceived God as the supreme Mor, 
Ruler who must maintain the dignity and authority of hi 
government. Socinus, as already remarked, occupied 
same position as Anselm regarding the nature of sin, bu 
deduced from the conception an opposite conclusion 
Both viewed sin as an offence against private honor a 
right ; Anselm concluded that it was suitable (and s 
practically necessary) that this honor and right shoul 
be satisfied by a reparation; Socinus that it was entirel, 
feasible for God to forgive private injury if he wished 
Grotius, on the contrary, viewed sin as a breach of God’ 
public law, a rebellion against his government, which mus 
be maintained and vindicated. The old Protestant the 
ology had transformed Anselm’s offended party into al 
administrator of public criminal law, and by defining retrib 
utive justice as the primary attribute of God, had substi- 
tuted for his suitable vindication of the divine honor the 
absolutely necessary plenary punishment of the world’s sin. 
This is the point at which the heresy of Grotius emerges 
Not only does he hold love to be the primary attribute 
of God, but he leaves out of view entirely the whole 
scheme of equivalence and imputation. Christ’s death is 
the equivalent of our punishment only in the sense that 
by it the dignity of God’s government is as effectively 
proclaimed and vindicated as it would have been by 
our punishment. Christ’s sufferings are only vice-penal 
or quasi-penal. With Grotius justice is not “distribu 
tive justice,” the strict equivalence principle of the post- 
Reformation orthodoxy ; it is “ rectoral justice,” 1 regard to 


1 Justitia rectoris, p. 113. 


THE GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF GROTIUS 165 


the interests of public law and order, by whose mainte- 
nance alone the general good can be conserved. 

When, now, the law has been broken by sin, it is nec- 
essary (if the sinners are to be spared) that the authority 
of the divine government should be asserted and dis- 
played. But does Grotius’s conception of God and of sin 
permit of a vicarious punishment as the means of ac- 
complishing this end? He frequently speaks of Christ’s 
being punished in our stead, but we must say, with 
Dr. Foster, that, “strictly speaking, in Grotius’s view, he 
was not punished at all, but his affliction was substituted 
for our punishment” (p. 260). His sufferings were those 
of a “ penal example” set forth “for the sake of the com- 
munity,” whereby God “testified his own hatred of sin, 
and so deterred us from it” (p. 108). God’s law, ordain- 
ing eternal death as the wages of sin, is declared to be 
“relaxable,” though “not easily or upon slight cause,” or 
“without some compensation,” lest sin should be lightly 
regarded (p.79). Now in ordaining and accepting the 
death of Christ instead of the death of sinners, God has 
exhibited both his clemency and his hatred of sin, and by 
this “singular method of relaxation” has shown us how 
serious a thing sin is, and has furnished a strong motive 
to deter us from it. We must conclude that, on Grotius’s 
own principles, he has no right to speak of Christ’s being 
punished in our stead, as he frequently does. Either he 
used such expressions in a loose and really improper sense 
or a glaring inconsistency is apparent in his theory. In 
its underlying principles, his is not a penal satisfaction 
theory, as Anselm’s is not. That distinction belongs 
(with qualifications) to the Reformers, and (without 
qualification) to their seventeenth-century successors. 

Another question of consistency lies near to hand upon 
which Dr. Foster has touched in his notes: How is 
the exegesis of Grotius to be reconciled with his theory? 
He strenuously insists that it is the uniform scriptural 
teaching that Christ bore our sins in the sense of suffer- 
ing their penalty. We must now ask, with Dr. Foster: 
“Can the punishment of our sins, endured, according to 


: 


166 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 






















these passages, by Christ as a strict substitute for us, be 
anything else than the satisfaction of the retributive ju 
tice of God? ‘The punishment of our sins, in the strict 
use of that term, certainly is intended to satisfy the re 
tributive justice of God. If Christ took the punishment 
of our sins upon himself, as these passages indicate, did 
he not suffer under the retributive justice of God?” 
(p. 264). We are concerned with this question only as 
it bears upon the theory of Grotius. Assuming, as Dr, 
Foster evidently does, that the exegesis of Grotius i 
substantially correct, it is certainly no easy task to adj 
it to the principles which we have seen to underlie hi 
theory. Dr. Foster himself answers the question by say 
ing that “ the Scriptures were not written for philosophic: 
purposes, nor in philosophical language, as is evident upe 
the slightest examination of them.” “We need no 
expect to find philosophical accuracy ” in them — indee 
the terms “ philosophical accuracy ” and “the Scriptures 
“express contrary ideas” (pp. 264, 265). But the point ¢ 
difficulty is that Grotius has seemed to treat their lang 
as “ philosophically accurate” and has derived from the 
a result which seems incongruous with his somewhat 
peculiar use of terms. The question is whether, if hi 
exegetical and critical assumptions are sound, the orthe 
doxy of the day could not easily refute his theory b; 
means of his own arguments. I am of opinion that th 
penal satisfactionists would have a distinct advantage ove 
him in the use alike of his exegesis and of his instructiy 
examples derived from heathen ethics and customs. 
But it is necessary to inquire somewhat more minutel 
into the nature and meaning of that law or governmer 
which holds so large a place in the scheme of Grotius 
What is its relation to the divine will, or nature ? 
general impression made by the author’s discussion is that 
he entertains a statutory conception of the law whos 
demands the death of Christ satisfies. God enacted th 
law that “‘every man that sinneth shall bear the punish 
ment of eternal death.” But since, in point of fact, som 
men are saved, it is certain that this law is not in al 


THE GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF GROTIUS 167 


.. executed, but relaxed. The law is not abrogated, 
or unbelievers are still exposed to its penalty; : but for 
ood and sufficient reasons its execution, in certain cases, 
: stayed. There are irrelaxable laws, continues Grotius, 
ach as that God cannot lie, or deny himself; but his 
etermination to punish every sin with its full measure of 
enalty is not of this character. “All positive laws are 
bsolutely relaxable.” If in some other way than by the 
unishment of sin, God maintains his rectoral authority, 
é may, without inconsistency, remit the penalty of sin. 
yy such a supposition we do not make God mutable. 
The law is not something internal within God, or the 
‘all of God itself, but only an effect of that will. It is 
erfectly certain that the effects of the divine will are 
wutable.” It belongs to the very nature of a positive law 
hat the legislator may, under certain circumstances, sus- 
end its operation. To the objection that it is just, and 
herefore necessary, that sinners should be punished with 
he full penalty of their sin, Grotius replies, in effect, that 
; does not follow that because it is just it is necessary. 
t may be just to doa thing which (even in the circum- 
tances) it is not unjust not to do. A man who gives a 
housand talents to another is liberal; but he is not 
ecessarily illiberal if he does not give them. That all 
rime deserves punishment is natural and necessary, but 
; does not follow either in human society or in the divine 
overnment that every crime must, under all circum- 
tances, receive its full measure of penalty. Nothing 
reyents the relaxation of penal law. Accordingly, we 
nd that the divine threats of punishment have not always 
een carried out ; on proper conditions, their execution 
as been withheld, as, for example, in the case of the 
hreats against the Ninevites. The penal law is, then, 
ispensable. But since by relaxation “ the authority of 
he law seems to be diminished in some respects, it follows 
hat it could not be relaxed easily, or upon slight cause.” 
(ow the sufficient reason for the relaxation in question was 
rod’s desire that men be saved; for if the penal law were 
0 be rigidly and strictly carried out, the salvation of any 


ij 


168 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


would have been absolutely impossible.t_ Applying th 
principles, Grotius contends that God in his merey sub 
tuted the sufferings of Christ for the punishment of s 
ners, and by means of this “ penal example” more hi 
honored his law and more effectively warned and deter 
men from sin than he could have done by punishing 
sinners themselves. 

Is the penal law, then, an arbitrary enactment of 
Does he, after all, adopt the view of his opponent, t 
punitive justice does not reside in God, but is an ef 
of his will? Does he make justice dependent on 
divine will and optional as to its exercise, thus giv 
it the same character and standing which his Calvinii 
contemporaries had assigned to merey? I think the re 
must be that such was not his intention. It must be 
membered that he uses the word “ justice ” in a more 
prehensive sense than the advocates of penal satisfa 
God’s justice is his rectitude, and that “is an attrik 
residing in God” (p. 110). God must disapprove 
condemn sin; it does not follow that he must punis 
The actual exercise of “ punitive justice” is depend 
on the divine will. Sin must ever appear blamewor 
in God’s sight, and his holy nature must ever r 
against it; but it is not necessary that he should alw 
proceed to inflict the penalty which the sin inheren 
deserves. If it were, then God would be precluded f 
exercising mercy at all. Grotius, equally with the ¢ 
vinists, grounds justice in the being or essence of G 
but he has a different conception of the nature, action, 
requirements of justice. To them justice means stl 
inexorable, irrelaxable vengeance, so much penalty fot 
much sin’; for him justice means the rectitude or ri 
character of God which he exercises in establishing an 
administering the moral system. This character of ¢ 
is immutably just, but the specific ways and means 
which he shall conduct his government are depend 
upon his will and wisdom. As a ruler he may stri 
execute or relax his positive laws, as he wills. It is 











1 Ch. iii., passim. 


THE GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF GROTIUS 169 


injust for him to will to relax them if, at the same time, 
e protects his dignity and authority in other ways. 
oreover, it is certain that, in point of fact, he has not 
nyariably punished sin, since he has saved and is saving 
ome men, that is, remitting their punishment. 

We next ask: What view did Grotius take of the divine 
yenevolence and of its relation to justice, whether general or 
yunitive? We must answer that he has not discussed the 
ubject. It must be remembered that the Defence is not 
o much a systematic, constructive treatise as a reply 
0 the arguments of Socinus. Still, this question is so 
undamental to his whole contention that we can only 
egard it as a weakness that he has not taken a more 
lefinite position with regard toit. His principles seem, 
lowever, clearly to require the view that love is primary 
n God, but that justice conditions love or determines the 
nethod of its exercise toward sinners. At the beginning 
f£ his work Grotius writes, “ The first cause which moved 
zod (to send his Son) is mercy or love to men” (p. 2). 
tisewhere he declares that the fact of God’s choosing to 
emit to us eternal punishment “has its cause in beneyo- 
ence, which is, of all the attributes of God, most truly 
eculiar to him. For everywhere (in Scripture) God 
lescribes himself chiefly by this attribute, that he is be- 
lignant and clement. Therefore, God is inclined to aid 
nd bless men; but he cannot do this while that dreadful 
md eternal punishment remains. Besides, if eternal 
leath should fall upon all, religion had totally perished 
hrough despair of felicity. There were, therefore, great 
easons for sparing man” (p. 105). Again, “ Among all 
lis attributes love of the human race is preéminent” 
p. 107). In this connection he contends that alongside 
Mf this clemency exists also the severity of God which 
sonditions the operation of his grace. In order to show 
hat he has no low estimate of sin, and as a means of pre- 
venting it, a due regard to the preservation of his gov- 
rmment requires that he should set forth Christ as a 
eased example,” who by revealing the ill desert 


; sin meets the moral ends of penalty. 


a 


170 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


The discussion of Grotius treats salvation chiefly on i 
negative side ; it is viewed, primarily, as liberation fro 
penalty. It is true that the sufferings of Christ as man 
representative are conceived to have a deterrent effec 
upon the commission of sin; but this aspect of his savin 
work is evidently regarded as secondary and incidental 
Primarily, the sufferings and death of Christ are not pat 
of a work of salvation; they belong to a plan or sche 1 
of salvation ; they represent conditions which haye to k 
fulfilled before God is at liberty to save men. All tl 
historic theories of atonement have this feature in comme 
Their problem is: How can God, consistently with hi 
justice, forgive sin, that is, withhold the penalty which h 
has ordained for transgression? How can he plan botl 
to express his hatred of sin and to realize his desire to for 
give the sinner? Atonement, then, appears as a dey 
whereby forgiveness, that is, suspension of penalty, be 
comes possible ; it is a compromise of some sort betweei 
the determination to punish and the desire to forgive. T 
the mind of Anselm God makes the adjustment by arrang 
ing to have his Son suffer and die in deference to hi 
offended dignity ; for Grotius God’s righteousness wa 
sufficiently asserted by requiring Christ to suffer as man’ 
representative in order to show to the world how strenuow 
were the requirements of his government; to the mind 
of the strict constructionists both these schemes wer 
inadequate. In neither case is sin punished, and hene 
the divine appetite for penalty is not appeased. What i 
necessary in order to open the way to a possible remissio1 
of penalty is not a mere “equivalent homage” to God’ 
honor (Anselm); no amount of homage can ever t 
equivalent to sin’s penalty. Nor is a display of the recti 
tude of God’s government enough (Grotius) ; this is too. 
vague and general; its “justice” reduces to mere equity 
and it does not even profess to maintain a satisfaction 
which is the strict equivalent of the eternal death of a 
mankind. There is only one thing which equals punish 
ment, and that is punishment. There can be no satisfae 
tion for sin except a punishment which is the full equivalen 















THE GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF GROTIUS vas 


of the penalty due to the world’s sin. Fundamentally 
different as these theories are in their content, they are 
formally alike. They all represent God as devising a way 
in which he may satisfy his honor, or his law, or his puni- 
five justice, as the case may be, in order that he may then, 
without self-contradiction, exercise his grace toward sin- 
ners — and this device is called “the plan of salvation.” 
[ts adoption and execution constitute the logical, if not the 
shronological, condition precedent of forgiveness. The 
scheme has, in itself, nothing to do with an actual salva- 
fion ; itis a process which precedes the real work of saving 
men ; it is wholly outside and independent of their moral 
fife or experience. It should be said, however, that if it 
is desirable to correlate the satisfaction in any direct way 
with real salvation from sinning, then the theory of Grotius 
has an advantage over that of Anselm and the post-Refor- 
mation dogma. In these Christ’s satisfaction is a payment 
of back debts ; with Grotius it is a deterrent from future 
offences. “If,” he says, “ Christ suffered such severities 
that ye might obtain the pardon of your sins, having 
indeed obtained it by faith, ye ought to beware of sinning 
in the future” (p. 16). 

The theory of Grotius, though strenuously opposed by 
the Calvinists, gradually extended itself on the continent 
and at length attained a widespread influence in both Eng- 
land and America. In Holland, however, his principles 
were modified in the direction of Socinianism. The later 
Arminians generally adopted the view that it depends 
upon the mere will of God whether he shall punish or for- 
give, and that he, of course, determines at what price he 
will be satisfied. This position involves a double departure 
from Grotius; it represents sin as a violation of private 
right (Anselm), and satisfaction as an acceptatio (Duns 
Scotus).1_ In England the theory, more or less modified, 
was adopted and advocated within the established Church 
by Archbishop Tillotson (1630-1694), Bishop Patrick 


1 To these results the theory was carried by the Arminians — Episco- 
plus (1583-1643), Curcelleus (d. 1659), and Limborch (1633-1712). 
See Foster’s Historical Introduction to the Defence, pp. xxi-xxvii, 


a 










172 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


(1626-1707), Daniel Whitby (1638-1726), and Samuel 
Clarke (1675-1728). Later it was developed and ren 
dered more precise by the chief theologian of the Wesley: 
movement, Richard Watson (1781-1833).! It has ever 
since remained the prevailing type of thought in Arminig 
theology. 

In due time the theory was destined to exert a trans- 
forming influence upon the Calvinism of New England. 
The collected works of Grotius were presented to the li- 
brary of Yale College by Bishop Berkeley in 1733. The 
writings of the English Arminians— Daniel Whitby, Joh 
Taylor, and Samuel Clarke —were in circulation fro 
about this time. The influence of the Grotian view is 
seen in Charles Chauncy (1705-1787), Joseph Bellam 
(1719-1790), and Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803), while 
Jonathan Edwards, Jr. (1745-1801), it was adopted bodily. 
From this beginning the Grotian principles and method of 
thought became so general as to be regarded as chara 
teristic of New England theology. The form which 
Grotian theory assumed in New England was commonly 
called the Edwardean, because certain elements of it a 
found in Jonathan Edwards, Sr., and because it was elab- 
orated by “the Edwardean school,” among whom was 
Jonathan Edwards, Jr.2. -We shall have occasion to touc 
upon the history and influence of the doctrine, and espe- 
cially to note its more recent transformations, in tl 
chapter after the next. 

It would be easy to point out limitations and defects iz 
the treatise of Grotius. He does not wholly escape th 
Socinian position which he had set himself to refute 
equally with Socinus he denies that penal satisfaction is 
necessary before sins can be forgiven. He is flagrantly 
inconsistent in his use of language ; he frequently speaks 
of Christ as being “punished,” though his principles e 

1 Cf. Foster, pp. xl-xlii. 

2 For an explanation and history of this theory see Professor Par! 
Introductory Essay prefixed to a volume of discourses and treatises 
entitled The Atonement, edited by him and published in Boston in 1869. 


This volume contains the exposition of the doctrine by the ‘‘ young 
Edwards ’’ in three sermons, 


THE GOVERNMENTAL THEORY OF GROTIUS 173 


clude such a supposition. Much of his exegesis and many 
of his illustrations drawn from heathenism prove too much. 
They are better adapted to prove a strict penal satisfaction 
than a governmental vindication. ‘The treatise is highly 
formal and legal in its mode of argument. It reminds one 
of a lawyer’s brief “ with its many an ‘aforesaid,’ ‘ there- 
fore, and ‘the same.’” It has almost nothing to say of 
the ethical aspects of salvation. The exposition is a ju- 
ridical dialectic, portraying a kind of apparatus hanging 
between heaven and earth. It is difficult to clothe it with 
the character of reality. In strict logical coherence and 
consistency it is hardly equal to its Calvinistic rival. Its 
fundamental assumptions are less definite and uncompro- 
mising. Morally it is more tolerable, but taken for what 
each of the historic theories purported to be —a logical 
demonstration deduced from definitions made to hand in 
advance —it is not so clear, precise, or conclusive. Still, 
its service has been great. It occupied middle ground 
between Socinianism and Calvinism. It represented a 
praiseworthy effort to find a point of view more satisfac- 
tory than either. It shrank from the conception of God 
as mere good nature as inadequate, and from the view of 
him as inexorable vengeance as monstrous. If Grotius 
was not entirely successful in finding a via media, it must 
be remembered that a middle position is always hardest 
to define. The extreme position is always easy to state, 
just because of its one-sidedness ; it requires no qualifica- 
tion or discrimination. The great value of Grotius’s work 
was indirect and remote. He challenged men to new 
methods of thought and opened the way to the considera- 
tion of his problem in new light. 


CHAPTER III 


MODERN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 


—_——s 


Our next task is to inquire how recent theological 


thought has related itself to the earlier theories which we 


have outlined. As has been already intimated, it is diffi- - 


cult, if not impossible, to separate modern writers on the 


subject into clearly defined classes. The elements of — 


various theories are, not infrequently, combined. Never- 
theless, we may distinguish three general types of thought 


which are sufficiently distinct to warrant separate treat-— 
ment, and this simple classification will serve us for 


purposes of illustration. We begin with that mode of 
explanation which is most closely akin to the views of 
the Reformers and seventeenth-century dogmaticians, and 
which ascribes to the sufferings of Christ the character of 
a penal satisfaction or judicial appeasement of distributive 
justice. No recent writer has presented this view more 
clearly and unequivocally than the late Dr. Shedd. The 
theory is constructed upon certain definitions of the 
divine attributes, justice and benevolence, and of their 
relations to each other. By justice is meant the uncon- 
ditional necessity to punish. By benevolence, or mercy, 
is meant an emotion of tenderness and pity which it is 
optional with God to indulge or not to indulge. This 
justice, moreover, this quid pro quo principle in God, is 
impersonal; it must issue forth in penalty, but not neces- 
sarily upon the guilty parties; an innocent substitute may 
receive the penal stroke. The postulates of the theory 
are thus expressed by Dr. Shedd: “ Retributive justice is 


necessary in its operation. The claim of the law upon the 


transgressor for punishment is absolute and indefeasible. 
The eternal Judge may or may not exercise mercy, but he 
174 ; 


MODERN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES eve 


must exercise justice.” 1 Elsewhere he explains that God 
is capable of two “opposite feelings at the very same 
moment,” namely, wrath and mercy, but that the differ- 
ence between them is that wrath is constitutive in his 
being, whereas mercy is voluntary or optional. “The 
two emotions of which we are speaking are clearly dis- 
eriminated from each other by the fact that one of them 
is constitutional and the other is voluntary. The divine 
wrath issues from the necessary antagonism between the 
pure essence of the Godhead and moral evil. It is, there- 
fore, natural, organic, necessary, and eternal. The logical 
idea of the Holy implies it. But the love of benevolence, 
or the divine compassion, issues from the voluntary dispo- 
sition of God —from his heart and affections. It is good- 
will.”? From these definitions the compatibility of the 
two opposite emotions is deduced. One is located in the 
“essence,” the other in the “disposition ” of the Deity. 
Strict distributive justice, then, must be exercised. All 
sin must be punished to the full. But how, in that case, 
ean it be forgiven? Can it be both punished and for- 
given? The answer is explicit: It must be punished 
before it can be forgiven; it must first be punished 
and then may be pardoned. But can God both eternally 
punish the sinner and also forgive him? Of course not; 
if he is to forgive him, he can only punish him vicari- 
ously in the person of another. But this is quite feasible, 
since justice is an impersonal feeling. It will have its 
vengeance, if not upon the sinners themselves, then upon 
some one else. Justice compels God to punish, but it does 
not compel him to punish only the guilty. ‘“ Hence,” 
writes Dr. Shedd, “in every instance of transgression, the 
penalty of law must be inflicted, either personally or vicari- 
ously; either upon the transgressor or upon his substitute. 
The remission of penalty under the divine administration 
F not absolute, but relative. It may be omitted in respect 
‘to the real criminal, but, if so, it must be inflicted upon 
some one in his place... . Justice necessarily demands 
that sin be punished, but not necessarily in the person of 


i 


1 Dogmatic Theology, Il. 436. 2 Theological Essays, pp. 270, 271. 


s 


176 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 































the sinner. Justice may allow of the substitution of one 
person for another, provided that in the substitution no 
injustice is done to the rights of any of the parties con- 
cerned.” ! ‘“ The correlate of guilt is punishment,” but not 
necessarily the punishment of the guilty; the “ justice ” 
of God is of such a character that it is equally well satis- 
fied with the punishment of the innocent and sinless, as 
with that of the guilty. The position, we think, is clear. 
The innocent is punished with the full measure of the 
penalty due to the sins of the guilty. Dr. Shedd speaks 
frequently of Christ as being “ vicariously punished.” 4 

We venture to think that the average modern mind is 
likely to be affected with a certain feeling of incongruity 
as it contemplates the goal toward which this reasoning 
is irresistibly leading. Still, it will not be found easy to 
point out any flaw in the argument, when once the defini- 
tions are conceded. The conclusions seem to flow logically 
from the premisses. We come next to the question, how 
we are to construe or even endure the idea of a vicarious 
punishment of Christ, now that we have obtained it by ir- 
resistible logic proceeding from axiomatic premisses. The 
answer is, that it is the prerogative of the Almighty 
punish the innocent if he chooses. Cannot he who made 
the law execute its demands in his own way? What i 
necessary is simply that the substitute be “accepted by 
the law and lawgiver. The primal source of law has no 
power to abolish penalty any more than to abolish law, but 
it has full power to substitute penalty.”% 


1 Dogmatic Theology, 1. 373. 2 E.g., op. cit., I. 375; Il. 436. 

8 Theological Essays, p. 300. Commenting on this statement the late 
Dr. E. G. Robinson says: ‘‘ What this ‘primal source,’ which he ca 
‘it,’ may be, is not quite so apparent as is desirable in such an 2 
ment. It is not very clear what ‘power’ an abstraction can have te 
change the sanction of an immutable law. The truth is, that an 
explanation or defence which can be given of a literal forensic substi- 
tution, necessarily involves in the end a contradiction of the idea of 
absolute justice upon which the whole theory rests; and Dr. Shedd’s 
conception of an absolute justice in God which his voluntary merey 
could satisfy or not, shuts us up to the alternative, either of a one-sided 
nature in God, or of an atonement which is stripped of every vestige 0} 
grace. An atonement made necessary to balance the character of Goé 


MODERN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES iT 





The next step in the argument is, that this substituted 
_ penalty should be “plenary,” “a full equivalent for the 
_ punishment due to mankind. ” This view alone “ minis- 
: _ ters to evangelical repose.” The vicarious punishment 
must be “strictly equivalent,” though not “identical” ; 
_ it need not (and in Christ’s case it did not) involve re- 
morse or endless suffering. How, then, could it be equiva- 
lent? The answer is that it was “of strictly equal value,” 
as when in paying a loan, one does not return the very 
coins borrowed, but others of precisely equal worth. 
_ That is “literally equivalent payment.” Such is the case 
in question. Christ’s penal suffering “contains the ele- 
‘ment of infinitude, which is the element of value in the 
| ease, with even greater precision than the satisfaction of 
_ the creature does; because it is the suffering of a strictly 
infinite Person in a finite time, while the latter is only 
the suffering of a finite person in an endless, but not 
‘strictly infinite time.” The conclusion seems to be that 
| the substitutionary punishment was even more than equiv- 
alent, since infinite Person plus finite time is held to be 
_ greater than finite person plus infinite time. This follows 


_ because the factor of personality in the equation is the one 
of chief value. The debt is more than paid ; the account 
shows a surplus. But in another connection this explana- 
tion is given: Every sin is infinitely guilty and requires 
“an infinite satisfaction, that is, the death of an infinite 

Being. “One sinner needs the whole infinite Christ and 
his whole sacrifice, because of the infinite guilt of his sin,” 

as much as “a million sinners would.”? This, says Dr. 
Shedd, is the “mathematical answer.” But I apprehend 

that some minds will feel a difficulty still. Christ’s 
“punishment which is declared to be “mathematically 
“infinite” is exactly equivalent to human guilt, but more 
than equivalent to what the total eternal punishment 
_ of all human sins would amount to, since that punishment 
would only be the suffering of finite persons. It would 








ote 


Renala not be a gratuity to men.’’ Christian Theology, p. 260. Cf. the 
remarks on the theory in question in chapter vi., infra. 
: 1 Theological Essays, pp. 300, 301. 2 Dogmatic Theology, II. 444. 


178 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 













seem, then, that the penalty ordained by the law agains 
sin could never have been adequate, if inflicted, sin 
Christ’s punishment is exactly equivalent to the guilt 
sin, but more than equivalent to its possible penalty. 

It will have been observed that this method of reason 
ing starts with a sharp discrimination between justice an 
mercy. They are regarded as attributes of entirely dif- 
ferent rauk and character. They sustain wholly different 
relations to the divine will and nature. They are often 
described as acting independently; they are viewed as 
contrasted, opposite, or even, possibly, antagonistie fae- 
tors in the character of God. Hence they are frequently 
referred to as being adjusted or reconciled to each other, 
or as treating with and making terms with one another. 
Accordingly Dr. Shedd tells us that in substituting him- 
self (incarnate) for the sinner, “ God’s own mercy satis- 
fies his own justice for the transgressor.”! Dr. A. H. 
Strong has developed his view of atonement from the 
same premisses, with a logic no less rigorous, but in lan- 
guage less commercial and mathematical. A synopsis of 
his argument is as follows: “ As we may be kind, but 
must be righteous; so God, in whose image we are made, 
may be merciful, but must be holy. Merey is optional 
with him. . . . Love is an attribute which, like omnipo- 
tence, God may exercise, or not exercise, as he will. 
With holiness it is not so. Holiness must be exercised 
everywhere. Justice must be done always,” etc. This 
justice, by which is meant retributive righteousness,” is 
. defined to be “a principle of God’s nature, not only in- 
dependent of love, but superior to love.” When we 

1 Dogmatic Theology, Il. 445. . 

2 Elsewhere the author defines his terms. Justice and righteousness 
are ‘‘ transitive holiness,’’ that is, holiness in exercise toward creatures, 
the former denoting holiness ‘chiefly in its mandatory,’’ the latter 
‘chiefly in its punitive aspect.’? Justice is ‘‘distributive or judicial 
holiness’? in which God “reveals chiefly his hatred of sin.’? This justice 
‘*‘binds God to punish.’”? He ‘can cease to punish sin only when he- 
ceases to be holy,’”? ‘‘Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur.’”’  Sys- 
tematic Theology, pp. 138, 139. 


It should be noted that this position of Drs. Shedd and Strong is 
not that of the Reformers, but that of the post-Reformation extrem- 





MODERN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 179 


think of what holiness is,” continues Dr. Strong, “it 
would indeed at first sight seem to exclude love.” One 
would almost think that in view of the fact that retribu- 
tive justice is “the fundamental and controlling attribute 
of God’s being,” there would be no room for love to 
sinners. ‘And yet, wonder of wonders ! —he loves the 
sinner and cannot see him perish. The complex nature 
of God is strangely capable of these two mighty emotions, 
—hatred for the sin and love of the sinner; or, to put it 
more accurately, love for the sinner, as he is a creature 
of infinite capacities of joy or sorrow, of purity or wicked- 
ness, but simultaneous hatred for that same sinner, as he 
is an enemy to holiness and to God.” 

But one naturally asks, how these two antithetic attri- 
butes, both of which Dr. Strong regards as “ constituent” 
in the nature of God, can dwell together in harmony. 
Justice insists upon the punishment of sin; mercy pleads 
for its pardon. What is to be the outcome? To put 
question and answer in. Dr. Strong’s own words: “ Tri- 
umphant holiness, submissive love—are these, then, in 
conflict with each other? Is there duality, instead of 
harmony, in the nature of God? Ah, there would be, 
but for one fact—the fact of the cross. The first and 
worst tendency of sin is its tendency to bring discord into 
the being of God, by setting holiness at war with love, 
and love at war with holiness. \| And since both these 
attributes are exercised toward sinners of the human race, 
ists. Ritschl justly remarks: ‘‘ The juridical construction of the idea of 
Christ’s satisfaction was originally intended only as a condition for the 
religious and moral certainty of justification in Christ; while the Re- 
formers recognized the providence, or grace, or love of God, as the lead- 
‘ing resort of the entire religious consciousness, and his justice, to which 
satisfaction is required to be given, as the subordinate principle in accord- 
ance with which the bestowal of grace through Christ had to be procured. 
In the theology of the period subsequent to them, this view of the rela- 
tive value of the two ideas ‘« involuntarily underwent a change.’’ His- 
tory, p. 305. The above-named writers diverge as widely from the 
doctrine of the Reformers as Dr. Hodge does from that of Anselm (see 
below). Their definitions accord only with the provincial hyper- 
orthodoxy of the seventeenth century. They are as unwarranted by 


historical orthodoxy in general as they are foreign to the Christian con- 
cept of God and repugnant to the moral sense of mankind. 


189 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 






















the otherwise inevitable antagonism between them is 
removed only by the atoning death of the God-man 
Their opposing claims do not impair the divine blessed- 
ness, because the reconciliation exists in the eternal 
counsels of God; Christ is the Lamb slain from the foun 
dation of the world.” 

In accord with these principles it is explained that in 
virtue of his union with humanity there is “an imputa- 
tion of our sins to Christ ” with all their guilt and penalty 
Dr. Strong quotes Melanchthon with approval: “ Chris 
was made sin for us, not only in respect to punishmen 
but primarily by being chargeable with guilt also,” and 
Thomasius: ‘Christ bore the guilt of the race by impu 
tation; he sank himself into our guilt.” Our author 
declares: “He took our guilt by taking our nature. 
“Guilt was not simply imputed to Christ, it was impartee 
also”; “Penalty and guilt are correlates; if Christ in 
herited penalty, it must have been because he inherited 
guilt.” This burden of penalty.and guilt “rested upor 
him from the very beginning of his life.” Did Christ 
then, have depravity also? No; he was purged fron 
depravity in the womb of the virgin, but guilt and penal 
remained. ‘“ We may say that Christ takes guilt with 
out depravity, in order that we may have depravity with- 
out guilt.”? In contrast with other theories, Dr. Strong 
designates this as “ the ethical theory of atonement.” ® 

1 Philosophy and Religion, pp. 196-198. 

2 Systematic Theology, pp. 412-416, esp. 415. 7 

8 In a more recent publication (Christ in Creation and Ethical Mo- 
nism, 1899) Dr. Strong has propounded a highly mystical view of Christ’s 
sufferings. Completely identifying Christ with God, he also declares 
that ‘‘ he 7s humanity.’? When God ‘‘ ordained sin he ordained also an 
atonement for sin,’’ and he who is the root and substance of humanity 
must suffer for sin as the body suffers when one of its members is i 
jured (pp. 32-34). Here Christ appears to be conceived as suffering the 
penalty of sin, not by substitution, but by identification. He is our 
‘‘natural life ’’; ‘his is the all-including consciousness’’; our bodies are 
manifestations of him, so that in sinful physical indulgences we a 
‘‘actually crucifying Christ.’ How this exposition is conceived by th 
author to stand related to the forensic penal theory elaborated in his Sy. 


tematic Theology I am unable to say ; it appears to proceed from entirel} 
different presuppositions and to imply a radically different metaphysic 


MODERN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 181 


If I correctly apprehend this exposition, it is a combi- 
nation of the following propositions: (1) Both justice and 
love are constitutive factors in God’s character, but the 
former is a primary, fundamental, and independent, while 
the latter is asecondary, optional, and dependent, attribute. 
The former is grounded in the divine essence ; the latter 
is dependent upon the divine will. (2) Accordingly God 
in his “strangely complex nature” is able both to love 
and to hate the same object at the same time. (3) Now 
the simultaneous operation of these “two mighty (but 
competing) emotions” would have involved the attributes 
of God in “discord” and actual “ war” unless a way had 
been found to reconcile them. (4) This pacification was 
accomplished by God’s punishing himself in the person of 
his own eternally holy Son. Thus mercy triumphed, and 
yet justice was satisfied. ‘There are questions which we 
should like to raise in connection with this theory, but 
we are here concerned with explanation, not with criti- 
cism. Yet one may properly feel the force of Dr. Shedd’s 
admission that “the extraordinary method” of appeasing 
justice by “crucifying a person of the Trinity” is “so 
strange and stupendous that it requires very high testi- 
mony and proof to make it credible.” ! 

Dr. Charles Hodge has defined the type of doctrine 
under review with his accustomed clearness and precision. 
The subject is connected in his view with that series of 
covenants or contracts by means of which God deals with 
the human race, and is developed in accord with the idea 


It reminds one of the views of Maurice and Dr. Simon and of Dr. Dale’s 
closing chapters. In a still more recent address (at Cleveland, Ohio, 
May 19, 1904), Dr. Strong acknowledges that we can no longer hold ‘‘ the 
old mechanical and arbitrary conceptions of the atonement,’”’ and ex- 
presses himself thus: ‘‘ Christ’s doing and suffering is not that of one 
external and foreign to us. He is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, 
the bearer of our humanity ; yes, the very life of the race. The life that 
he lived in Palestine and the death that he endured on Calvary were the 
revelation of a union with mankind which antedated the Fall. Being 
thus joined to us from the beginning, he has suffered in all human sin; 
in all our affliction he has been afflicted,’’ ete. ‘‘So we add to the idea 
of substitution the idea of sharing,’’ etc. 
1 Dogmatic Theology, II. 447. 


182 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 





of unconditional election. The discussion begins with a_ 
definition of terms. The author parts company with An- 
selm at the start by distinguishing two kinds of satisfac- 

tion, —commercial and penal. Commercial satisfaction — 
is simply payment of so much for so much; there is no 
condescension or mercy or grace involved in it. The sat- 
isfaction of Christ is not of this character.1 Penal sation’ 
faction relates not to debts, but to crimes. Here the 
demand is upon the person of the offender. The essential 
point is, not how much shall be paid, but “who shall 
suffer. The soul that sins, it shall die.” This definition 
of terms would seem to leave no place for substitution 
in the case of crimes or sins, but we are told that it is 
competent for the sovereign authority or magistrate by a 
special “ covenant” or “agreement” to arrange to have 
an innocent person punished for a guilty person’s crime. 
It is noticeable that no illustration of this possibility is 
offered, nor any argument advanced to support it; the 
punishment of the innocent in the place of the guilty is 
declared to be feasible if there is a divine covenant or 
bargain to that effect. Hence penalty is defined as suf- 
fering inflicted with a certain design; namely, the satisfac- 
tion of justice. The word “ penalty” denotes nothing as 
to the nature of the suffering or as to the person to whom 
it is due, but only designates the “intention” of the suf- 
fering. Punishment is suffering endured for the satis- 
faction of justice. It is obvious that the definition is so 
constructed as to leave room for the idea that an innocent 
person may suffer the punishment of a crime as appro- 
priately as the person who committed it, provided, of 






























1 And yet, when, later, Dr. Hodge essays to answer the objection th 
guilt cannot be transferred, he returns to this commercial idea and like’ 
Christ’s satisfaction to the payment of a debt. ‘The transfer of guilt 
or righteousness, as states of consciousness or forms of moral character, 
is indeed impossible. But the transfer of guilt as responsibility to justice 
and of righteousness as that which satisfies justice, is no more impossibl 
than that one man should pay the debt of another. All that the Bibl 
teaches on this subject is that Christ paid, as a substitute, our debt 
the justice of God”? (op. cit. II. 540). Here the discarded idea of co: 
mercial payment is brought in as a means of parrying the objection. 


MODERN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 183 


course, there is a proper contract to that effect. When 
in the definition of penalty the fact is left out of view 
that the penalty of any sin or crime belongs to him who 
does it, the whole case for the possibility of “ vicarious 
punishment” is obviously assumed.? 

By vicarious is meant “ suffering endured by one person 
in the stead of another, that is, in his place. . 
When, therefore, it is said that the sufferings of Christ 
were vicarious, the meaning is that he suffered in the place 
of sinners.”? Accordingly, there is nothing vicarious 
about the sufferings of patriots or martyrs. The word 
“ouilt” is next defined. It hasa twofold meaning. Con- 
sidered as ill desert or demerit, it is “inseparable from 
sin. It can belong to no one who is not personally a 
sinner, and it permanently attaches to all who have sinned. 
It cannot be transferred from one person to another.” 
But guilt has a second meaning: “obligation to satisfy 
justice. This may be removed by the satisfaction of 
justice personally or vicariously. It may be transferred 
from one person to another.” This second aspect of guilt 
is illustrated thus: “‘ When a man steals or commits any 
other offence to which a specific penalty is attached by 
the law of the land, if he submit to the penalty, his guilt 
in this latter sense is removed. Justice demands his 
2xemption from any further punishment. It is in this 
sense that it is said that the guilt of Adam’s sin is imputed 
jo us; that Christ assumed the guilt of our sins; and that 
ais blood cleanses from guilt.”* The reader will observe 
shat in the case of the criminal used for illustration here, 
‘t is not even suggested that justice might be equally well 
1 Cf. Systematic Theology, Il. 470-474. Some of the earlier New 
Qngland theologians, whose general theory was ‘‘governmental,’’ also 
ield similar language. Hopkins, for example, says that Christ ‘‘ did 
hot suffer that particular kind of pain which is the necessary attendant, 
ir natural consequence, of being a sinner, and which none but the sinner 
imself can suffer. But this is only a circumstance of the punishment 
f sin, and not the essence of it.’’ This seems to imply that guilt is not 
he necessary correlate of punishment. Hence he goes on to say that 
Yhrist, though innocent, could perfectly well suffer the whole penalty of 


Works, I. 381. 
| 7 Op. cit., II. 475. 3 Op. cit., II. 476. 


¥ 
i 




















a 






























184. THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


satisfied by some innocent party’s enduring his punishm 
Yet this was what needed to be shown in order to br 
the chasm between the human analogy and the dit 
sovereign arrangement. I cannot find that in any insta 
Dr. Hodge has attempted to show by illustration or ar 
ment that justice as understood among men, or 4 


substituting innocent persons for guilty ones in pun 
ment. This is a prerogative and peculiarity of the diy 
justice alone. God only is so just that he can appease 
vengeance by punishing the innocent. The authors wh 
systems we are reviewing, might fitly have concluded tk 
discussions with that confession of theological despair 
which one of their seventeenth-century forerunners, He 
was driven when pursuing the same course of argume 
namely, that the theory of vicarious punishment 1 
upon the fact that what would be unjust in men— 
punishment of the innocent—is exactly the reverse in G 
—a proof of his justice.} 

By Christ’s assumption of our guilt and endurane 
our punishment “God is propitiated.” “ Guilt must 
visited with punishment,” and “it is expiated by se 
faction, that is, by vicarious punishment. God is ther 
rendered propitious, that is, it is now consistent with 
nature to pardon and bless the sinner.” God’s “nat 
demands the punishment of sin; therefore there can 
no remission without such punishment, vicarious or ] 
sonal.’’ These propositions, declares Dr. Hodge, “h 
been denied only by those who are outside of the Chu 
and therefore not Christians, or by those who, instead 
submitting to the simple word of God, feel constrainec 
explain its teachings in accordance with their own s 
jective convictions.”? It will be noted, however, t 
Dr. Hodge’s historical illustrations of this doctrine 
“vicarious punishment” are drawn almost exclusiy 
from the post-Reformation dogmatics. The truth ist 
his doctrine of satisfaction by punishment was as fore 
to Anselm as it was to Grotius. Its appearance in 


1 See Ritschl, History, p. 308. 2 Op. cit., II. 478, 479. 


4 
f 


MODERN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 185 


theology of the Church as a whole is sporadic and excep- 
tional. It is a modern extravagance in belief and state- 
ment. But of this, more hereafter. 

Having seen what are the definitions on which the 
theory is constructed, it is needless to follow Dr. Hodge 
through his more detailed statement and “proof” of the 
doctrine. The entire result is put into the definitions in 
advance, and the labor of drawing it out afterward is not 
difficult. When one is making definitions, it must be his 
own fault if he does not make them as he wants them. 
The fact that they may find no analogy or warrant in 
human life or relations need be no obstacle, since we are 
dealing here, ex hypothesi, not with principles of universal 
obligation, but with sovereign decrees and inaccessible 
sontracts between persons of the Trinity. The tacit 

ssumptions of this reasoning are that theology isa science 

ea explains the known by means of the unknown, and 

jhat the ethics of the divine “ covenants” are of so supe- 

‘ior an order that the rights and duties which obtain among 
en are not available to illustrate them. 

It is only necessary to note, further, that Christ “ paid 
she debt” of those only whom God in his eternal decree 
f salvation had chosen to save. Dr. Hodge points out 
hie absurdity of supposing that Christ should die to save 
those whom God never intended to save; nay, had from 
ternity “for the manifestation of his glory,” as the Con- 
ession says, ‘‘fore-ordained to everlasting death ” (III. iii). 

he merit of Christ’s death is, indeed, sufficient to save 
hem, if God had any intention to do so; but he has not; 
heir fate is sealed in advance. But we are told that the 
tonement is not wholly without reference even to the 
lon-elect. They are not entirely deprived of “ uncove- 
anted mercies.” For example, the death of Christ is 
the ground on which salvation is offered” to them, 
though all possibility of the offer being effective in their 
e is excluded by their eternal reprobation. Some will 
sel that this is arather doubtful benefit. It is the “ bless- 
g” which is graciously granted to a starving man when 
is permitted to contemplate food of which it is eternally 













186 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE _ 


decreed that he shall never taste. There flow from ital 







idential and religious.”” What these are is not state 
but they are presumably of the same nature as that alrea 
specified; at any rate, the remotest possibility of salvati 
is not among them.! 

I have cited the opinions of these three American the 
logians because they illustrate, better than those of a 
other three recent writers? known to me, the rigid carr 
ing out, though in somewhat differing ways, of the po: 
tions of the seventeenth-century dogmatics. In but y 
few books on the atonement which are fairly recent 
the old Protestant traditional theory been preserved y 
out important qualifications. In Germany I do not kne 
of a single prominent living theologian who has cha 
pioned it in any well-known treatise. It was mainta: 1 
by Beck, Hengstenberg, Thomasius, and Philippi, but the 
seem to have been the last of their race. Indeed, the mo 


1 Op. cit., II. 544 sq. 2 Dr. Hodge died in 1878; Dr. Shedd in 1§ 

3 F. A. B. Nitzsch states that Philippi (d. 1882) was the only pro 
nent German theologian who, in recent years, has championed 
strictly penal theory. Dogmatik, p. 483. Professor Kaftan of Be 
writes me in a private letter: ‘‘ Eigentlich ist unter den Theologen | 
mand mehr, der die Lehre von dem stellvertretenden Strafleiden im al 
Sinn noch vertritt. Die Theologen aber, die ‘ positiv’ sein wollen t 
als solche gelten, verneinen die Lehre auch nicht ausdriicklich. Sie di 
ten sie in irgend einem Sinn um, den zu verstehen schwer und zu 
halten noch schwerer ist.... Aber, wie gesagt, einen wirklicl 
Vertreter der alten Lehre giebt es unter den lebenden namhafte 
deutschen Theologen nicht mehr.’? Dean Ménégoz of Paris informs 
that among French Protestants the theory has no representatives ¥ 
have attracted attention by any publications written in its defence. 
a later communication, however, Dr. Ménégoz sends me the follow 
extract, illustrating the theory in question, taken from an article in 
Temoinage, a religious journal of Paris, and written by F Professor 
Vaucher of the Paris Faculty of Theology :— 

‘* Pour quwil expiat les péchés, il fallait qu’ils devinssent siens, qu 
prissent possession de lui. Il devait mourir maudit. Et c’est e 
invasion du mal dans son €tre qui constitue la crise terrible de Ge 
sémané. Il est innocent et il a une conscience de coupable. II est 
fils bien aimé du Pére et le Pére le renie. Il a lutté contre Sata 
Satan s’empare de lui. Il est fait un membre de ce royaume des t 
bres auquel il a apporté la lumiére, et la mort qu’il va subir est deve 
une mort méritée, la conséquence naturelle, nécessaire de ce qu’il est. 





MODERN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 187 


fication of the theory in question by many, and its rejection, 
root and branch, by others, has been in no small degree 
due to what Dr. Hodge called an “infection” of German 
thought, the symptoms of which he discerned and depre- 
eated. At any rate, for better or for worse, this theory is 
moribund. The three American representatives of it 
whose views we have just outlined, cannot be paralleled 
among contemporary British theologians. 

The theory under review was maintained by the late 
Scotch divines, Dr. George Smeaton! and Dr. T. J. Craw- 
ford? in their biblical studies of atonement. They did 
not, however, develop the conception to its logical issues 
so thoroughly as do the American theologians cited, — 
perhaps in part because their discussions purport to be 
purely biblico-theological. Starting with the axiom that 
the atonement is “‘a matter of pure revelation,’ Dr. Smea- 
ton finds the penal satisfaction conception of our Lord’s 
saving mission in all his own sayings and in those of the 
New Testament writers, which bear upon the subject. 
“Jesus was visited,” he says, “with penal suffering, 
because he appeared before God only in the guise of our 
accumulated sin; not therefore as a private individual, 
but as a representative, sinless in himself, but sin-covered; 
loved as a Son, but condemned as the sin-bearer, in virtue 
of that federal union between him and his people, which 
lay at the foundation of the whole. Thus God condemned 
sin in the flesh, and in consequence of this there is no 
condemnation to us.” “Infinite guilt renders an infinite 


‘¢ Et e’est cette situation, le saint de Dieu envahi par le péché, qui pro- 
duit la révolution terrible par laquelle Jésus est écrasé dans le jardin. 
Tl marchait vers la croix depuis le début de son ministére ; il était venu 
pour mourir et il le savait. Mais ici, l’obéissance 4 la volonté de 
son Pére l’améne 4 cette situation contre nature d’étre séparé de son 
Pére et maudit de lui et c’est 14 la coupe qui lui cause une indicible 
horreur.”’ 

Iam not aware that in America the theory has been maintained in any 
noteworthy book or treatise since the appearance of the Systematic The- 
ologies of Drs. Shedd and Strong. 

1 The Doctrine of Atonement as taught by Christ Himself (1868) and 
The Doctrine of Atonement as taught by the Apostles (1870). 

2 The Doctrine of Holy Scripture respecting the Atonement (1871). 


188 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


satisfaction necessary, nay, indispensable.”1 In his Pref- 
ace (p. vi) he deprecates the tendency to emphasize 
“spiritual life, divine love, and moral redemption, as con- 
trasted with everything forensic,” and characterizes it as 
““a new phenomenon in theology.” Dr. Smeaton makes 
little effort to justify the penal theory to reason. He 
regards it as a divinely revealed interpretation of Christ’s 
death, and whether it accords with human reason or not is 
of small consequence. All we can say is that God was 
pleased to make Christ our penal representative, as he 
had made Adam our federal representative in probation. 
Of both arrangements he says, “To give reasons argues 
a pretension to knowledge which is not given to us.” ? 
Dr. Crawford also holds, with Dr. Hodge, that if there 
is any satisfaction to justice in Christ’s death, it must 
have lain in the infliction of penalty. Justice is “ God’s 
purpose to inflict penalty”; hence justice can be exhibited 
and satisfied only by “the execution of that penalty.” 
There could be no exhibition of justice which is not an 
exercise of justice, and it is assumed that justice can be © 
exercised only in punishment.? This author declares that 
“the sufferings of Christ were penal in their character, 
or, in other words, that they were judicially inflicted in the 
execution of a law which denounced punishment on the 
sins of men.” * In this connection he refers to Archbishop 
Magee’s “strong scruples as to this mode of characteriz- 
ing ” Christ’s sufferings, and while he “ cannot help think- 
ing it a groundless scrupulosity which Dr. Magee shows,” 
yet he declares that, “upon the whole, it is to be wished 
that the word ‘punishment’ had not been used.” One can 
only wonder why this is to be wished, since, as we have 
seen, Dr. Crawford elsewhere quotes with approval the 
assertion of Dr. Hodge that justice can be expressed and 
satisfied in no other way than by punishment. Whether 
or not we are to discern here a slight shrinking from the 
logic of the penal theory, Iam quite confident that our 
author betrays a reluctance to assert the strict intrinsi¢ 


1 Doctrine of the Apostles, pp. 177, 324. 2 Op. cit., p. 159. 
3 Op. cit., pp. 878, 379, 4 Op. cit., p. 183. 





guivalence of Christ’s sufferings to the punishment of the 
yorld’s sin. There is a touch of the acceptatio gratuita of 
Juns Scotus in defining the penal equivalence to mean 
‘simply that these sufferings were accepted by the supreme 
awgiver and righteous Moral Governor of the universe 
sa ground on which he might show mercy to his sinful 
reatures consistently with the rectitude of his character 
nd the authority of those laws which, as a just God, he is 
oncerned to uphold.” Elsewhere he declares, “ All that 
6 very much concerns us to be assured of is, that the suf- 
erings of Christ were deemed sufficient in the judgment of 
rod to satisfy his justice, to expiate our guilt, and to ob- 
ain for us eternal redemption.” ! I submit whether we 
aye not here obvious traces of the Scotian and Arminian 
eresies of acceptilatio and governmental satisfaction.? 
jut, in any case, the doctrine of atonement is for our 
uthor, as for Dr. Smeaton, “a pure matter of revelation ” 
Preface, p. v), and, as such, is beyond the ken of reason. 
The principle or rationale of the divine procedure in this 
aatter we may not be able fully to explain.” The fact is 
hat God has “appointed and accepted the sufferings of 


MODERN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 189 
















1p. cit., pp. 176, 185. 
| 2 Since writing the above I have found my judgment confirmed by the 
Mowing words from Principal Simon: ‘‘Some parts of Dr. Crawford’s 
xposition are, I think, open to the further criticism that it approaches 

ferously near, if not to the governmental theory, yet to that most 
djectionable of all theories, the acceptilatio theory ; otherwise, what is 
€ meaning of such words as, ‘ appointed and accepted by God in place of 
‘e yery penalty of sin,’ especially if he seriously approve, as he seems 
; do, of Dr. C. Hodge’s statement: ‘the penalty of the law must be 
flicted’ 2? If justice requires the penalty, 7.e. surely the very penalty ; 
id if another than the very penalty is appointed and accepted in its 
lace, have we not a case of an artificial, unreal value being put upon 
hd character assigned to something at the good pleasure of him to whom 
‘is offered 2? And what is this but acceptilatio ? If Christ’s sufferings 
ere not the very penalty, there could be no question of their being 
ppointed and accepted’ by God ‘in place of’ the very penalty.”’ The 
2zdemption of Man, pp. 22, 23. Dr. Simon points out that the Hodges, 
30, by hinging the equivalence of Christ’s suffering to,the penalty of 
fl upon a decision of the divine wisdom to regard them as having dig- 
y and value enough to answer their purpose, closely approximate 
2 acceptilatio theory, on which both writers pour out the vials of 
2ir theological indignation.”’ Op. cit., Appendix, Note III. 


190 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 














our Lord as a propitiation ”; beyond this “revealed fae 
we cannot and do not need to go.? 

No British theologian, so far as I know, has, within 
cent years, consistently elaborated or defended the thec 
of vicarious punishment. Among present-day write 
commonly reckoned as conservative, we shall find or 
approximations to the doctrine or an ambiguous use 
some of its terms. Although Dr. R. W. Dale frequen 
employed the terminology of the penal theory and strer 
ously supported the proposition that in his homage 
«the eternal law of righteousness” Christ “made the 
sequences of our sin his own,” he denied that there ¥ 
“any imputation of sin” to him, and pronounced su 
an alleged imputation “a legal fiction.”2 Dr. Dale h 
that the sufferings of Christ were not punishment, bt 
substitute for punishment, subserving the same moral ent 
“If God does not assert the principle that sin dese 
punishment by punishing it, he must assert that priney 
in some other way.” This “other way” is “to endl 
suffering instead of inflicting it.” “It belonged to G 
to assert, by his own act, that suffering is the just res 
of sin. He asserts it, not by inflicting suffering on | 
sinner, but by enduring suffering himself.”* Dr. D 
also developed the conception of an original and ideal 
tion of Christ to mankind as its Head and Representatt 
whereby his act becomes ours; but here, too, he denied a 
“ fictitious imputation or technical transfer.” * It is eviden 
that this theory of satisfaction, in spite of its strong asset 
tion that the death of Christ is the ground of forgiven 
differs widely from the doctrine of vicarious punishment. 

1 Op. cit., pp. 179, 180. 

2 The Atonement, the Congregational Union Lecture for 1875. 
ace to the seventh edition, p. Ixiii. 

8 Op. cit., p. 391. 4 Op. cit., p. 392. 5 Of. Lect. X, pass 

6 | should say that Dr. Dale’s exposition, taken as a whole, resem 
that of Grotius more nearly than that of the post-Reformation ortho dox 
It may be added that it resembled the theory of Grotius in its inconsis 
ency, as well as in its principles. But it has strong mystical, as wel 
governmental, elements. It is acutely criticised by Moberly, Atone 


and Personality, pp. 382-396. Of. Lidgett, The Spiritual Principle 
the Atonement, pp. 165-170. 





MODERN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 191 


Whether Professor Orr intends in his Kerr Lectures! 
to give his assent to the penal satisfaction view of Christ’s 
death, I am not able to determine. He speaks of “ guilt 
being removed ” by it, and designates it as “ the ground on 
which God forgives sin.” He says that “the Scriptures 
appear to assert a direct relation of the sacrifice of Christ 
to the sin and guilt of men, —a direct expiatory power to 
remove that guilt,—a relation not only to God’s com- 
manding will, but to his condemning will.” He charac- 
terizes Dr. J. McLeod Campbell’s theory as “ artificial and 
indefensible,” because he repudiates the idea of a “ vicari- 
ous endurance of the penalties of transgression,” from 
which it may be inferred that Dr. Orr entertains this idea. 
It is further involved in Dr. Campbell’s view that Christ 
“is himself in no sense brought under the experience of 
the wrath of God, or of its penal effects; it may be 
thought by many he could not be.” Does Dr. Orr hold 
that he was? Perhaps so, since he adds that “in order 
that Christ’s Amen to the judgment of God against sin 
might have its fullest content, it would appear to be neces- 
sary that it should be uttered . . . under the actual press- 
ure of the judgment which that wrath inflicts.” Stating 
his own views, Dr. Orr declares that Christ entered, “so 
far as a sinless Being could, into the penal evils of our 
state, and finally submitted to death — the doom which sin 
has brought on our humanity.” ‘“ He experienced the full 
bitterness of these evils” and thus recognized and honored 
the justice of God and made a satisfaction to righteous- 
ness. Christ entered “into the penal evils of our condi- 
tion” ; in what sense, is not explained.? I cannot imagine 
a more cautious statement of the penal theory than this if 
it is meant to be such. The Scriptures appear to assert a 
relation between Christ’s death and guilt; it appears to 
be necessary that Christ should feel the pressure of divine 
judgment ; Christ endured “penal evils,” “so far as a 
sinless Being could.” How far could he? In what sense 
were the evils he endured “penal,” and in what way did 


1 The Christian View of God and the World, Lect. VIII. 
2 Op. cit., pp. 354-865. 


192 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


he “experience” them? The theory of vicarious punish- 
ment had definite answers to all these questions. I can 
find none in Dr. Orr’s discussion. Of imputation, equiva 
lence, plenary payment, and the like, I find no trace. 
Principal D. W. Simon, starting from a kenotie theo 
of the incarnation and using the conception of Christ as 
the Head of the organism of humanity, has developed the 
idea that his sufferings and death were designed to “ rec- 
tify our relations” with God. Christ “passed through 
the darkness and pain caused by the divine relation to 
sin.” But Dr. Simon denies in toto that Christ bore th 
penalty of the law in man’s stead. He interprets the say- 
ing work of Christ from the standpoint of the incarnation ; 
in virtue of his union with our race Christ becomes the 
Mediator between God andman. “As human sin passed 
through Christ to God, so the divine action toward sin 
passed through Christ to man.”? There is a strong my: 
tical vein in this exposition. In the crucifixion “ the life 
of humanity, entering him subconsciously, must have been 
most completely laden with sin and with the fear of death, 
which is its fruit, at the very moment when he himself 
was enduring death in its most terrible form.”® Dr. 
Simon has strongly emphasized the divine wrath against sin 
and the “objective” aspect of reconciliation, but, like Dr. 
Dale, he utterly repudiates the idea of a penal equivalence 
of the sufferings of Christ to the punishment due to sin. 


























‘ 


1 The breach between Dr. Orr and the old Protestant theory of atone- 
ment is most apparent in this passage: ‘‘If I might indicate in a word 
what I take to be the tendency of the modern treatment of the atone- 
ment, I would say that it consists in the endeavour to give a spiritual 
interpretation to the great fact which lies at the heart of our redemption, 
—not necessarily to deny its judicial aspect, for that, I take it, will be 
found impossible, — but to remove from it the hard, legal aspect it is a 
to assume when treated asa purely external fact, without regard to i 
inner, spiritual content ; and, further, to bring it into harmony with the 
spiritual laws and analogies which obtain in other spheres.’ Op. cit., 
p. 341. I infer that Dr. Orr sympathizes with this ‘‘tendency,’’ the 
description of which strikingly suggests that ‘‘ new phenomenon in thi 
ology,’ the special emphasis upon ‘moral redemption,’? which Dr. 
Smeaton so greatly deprecated. 

2 The Redemption of Man, p. 323. 

8 Reconciliation by Incarnation, p. 366. 








SS 














MODERN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 193 


A closer approximation to the penal theory is found in 
Dr. D. W. Forrest’s Kerr Lectures.1 Dr. Forrest says 
that Christ “died a death which in a sense he made his 
own,” but on the next page tells us that “it is not pos- 
sible to imagine” that this death was “the death of 
sinners with the sting of sin in it,” and adds: “To say 
that he died our death is a permissible expression, but it 
is not scriptural; and it may fatally mislead. The death 
which is due to the sinner is abiding separation from God. 
That death he did not die, but averted from us. To 
attempt to find in his death for us some exact equivalent 
to the condemnation from which he redeems the sinner, 
is to de-spiritualize his sacrifice.” But were Christ’s suf- 
ferings penal? Did Christ vicariously bear the punish- 
ment of the world’s sin? Dr. Forrest seems to say so. 
“ By his voluntary identification of himself with sinners, 
... he suffered as their representative the penalty of 
God’s displeasure at human sin, and acknowledged it to 


- be just.” He was really conscious “of the condemnation 


of God resting upon him as its (humanity’s) representa- 
tive.” Some have argued, continues Dr. Forrest, that 
this consciousness of Christ “was only the vivid mental 
realization of God’s wrath against sin to which he in- 
wardly responded, not the actual experience of it.” But 
our author holds that he actually experienced the divine 
wrath as resting upon him in his representative character. 
“It was the experience of the divine displeasure toward 
a race of which he had freely chosen to become one.” 
But did not this suffering with and for sinful man arise 
from sympathy? Dr. Forrest admits that a sympathy 
like that of Christ was, indeed, no mere “sentimental 
feeling.” But “there is more than sympathy — there is 
a oneness of life with men . . . which has no parallel in 
human experience.”2 Now, while terms like “suffering 
penalty ” and “experiencing wrath” seem consistent only 
with the penal theory and are certainly borrowed from 
it, yet we find Dr. Forrest suggesting that we had better 


1 The Christ of History and of Experience, Lect. VI. 
2 Op. cit., pp. 238, 239. 


194 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 





























beware of such an expression as “Christ’s dying o 
death,” and denying entirely the doctrine of an equiva 
lence between our Lord’s sufferings and the penalty due 
to sin. How Christ suffered the penalty of sin, was 
conscious of God’s condemnation resting upon him and 
actually experienced his wrath, and yet did not suffer 
the full equivalent of sin’s condemnation, is a fair ques 
tion. It is sufficient for our purpose to note that the 
penal satisfaction theory affirms this last proposition 
while Dr. Forrest denies it. 

In Professor Denney’s Studies in Theology we are told 
that ‘“ Christ deals with God’s condemnation on man in @ 
great and serious way.” “He puts it away by bearing 
it. He removes it from us by taking it upon himself.” 
“God forgives our sins because Christ died for them” ; 
“our condemnation came upon him” ; “God’s condemne 
tion of sin fell upon him”; *“ he died that death of ours 
which is the wages of sin”; “in his death a divine sen- 
tence was executed upon the sin of the world”; “God 
lays the sentence for sin on his Son,” who “dies the 
sinner’s death.” Dr. Denney quotes approvingly the 
hymn, “In my place condemned he stood; Hallelujah.” 
** As Dr. Dale has put it,” he continues, “ Christ did not 
come to preach the gospel; he came that there might 
a gospel to preach.” 1 ‘ The cross is the place at which the 
sinless One dies the death of the sinful; the place at which 
God’s condemnation is borne by the Innocent.” He re- 
joices in the word “ substitution.” ‘ We have no standing 
in grace but that which he has won for us; nothing but 
the forfeiting of his free life has freed our forfeited lives. 
That is what is meant by calling Christ our substitute.” 
One great advantage of this view, continues our author, - 
is that “it can be preached.” It is the “ barb” which - 
you must have “on your hook” if you would catch men. 


1 The passage to which allusion is here made is, I suppose, the follow- 
ing: ‘* The real truth is that while he came to preach the gospel, his chie; ; 
object in coming was that there might be a gospel to preach’? (italies” 
mine), The Atonement, p. 46. It will be seen how differently Dr. Dale 


and Dr. Denney have ‘‘ put it’’ ; but this is by the way. 


~ 


| MODERN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 195 


\ll views but this appear to be regarded as a compound 
#£ theological Socinianism and ethical Antinomianism, 
‘annihilating the moral order of the world altogether.” 
Dther views make the mercy of God “accessible apart 
rom Christ,” teach that “ God does not need to be BEC: 
vitiated,” and so “subvert all moral distinctions” 
vhereas “the whole meaning, contents, substance, anid 
pirit of the expression ‘God is love’ are contained in 
ropitiation, and in nothing else.” ? 

The later work of Dr. Denney, The Death of Christ, 
8 3 biblico-theological in form, and is devoted to the main- 
enance of propositions like the foregoing by means of 
xegetical arguments. The idea of a _ substitutionary 
leath whereby God is propitiated is found by this author 
n almost all passages which refer in any way to Christ’s 
uffering or dying, and is shown to be logically involved 
vhether expressed or not. He is especially fond of the 
ormula, “ He died our death,” which Dr. Forrest thinks 
inly “ permissible,” as it is “not scriptural” and ‘“ may 
atally mislead.” Both books picture a God estranged from 
aan by reason of sin. The world lies helpless and hope- 
ess under the Almighty’s frown and curse. Sin, guilt, 
yunishment, — these are the dominant notes of Dr. Den- 
ey’s theology. Of divine love we know and can know 
\othing save as it is discerned in and through propitiation. 
che question of God’s character is not further considered. 
“he moral aspects of the work of Christ are regarded as 
ntirely secondary and dependent upon his external propi- 
iation for sin “outside of us”; they have no place and no 
neaning until Christ by his death in our stead lifts the 
urden of guilt which was crushing us to perdition. 
“oward all mystical modes of viewing our subject Dr. 

Jenney displays an undisguised repugnance. We seem, 
t length, to have found a theologian whose opinions 
vetray no sympathy with Dr. Smeaton’s dreaded “new 
shenomenon in theology.” 

_ Until lately I had supposed that all the foregoing state- 
nents had been meant in the sense of a strict penal satis- 


1 Studies in Theology, pp. 100-182, passim. 




























196 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


faction, but in the author’s more recent work entitled, 
Atonement and the Modern Mind,’ a somewhat differ 
impression is conveyed. Dr. Denney expresses s 
that his earlier views should have been regarded as “ leg 
“juridical,” and “ forensic,” and repudiates these terms 
inapplicable to them.2 Here the atonement appears as 
demonstration of love made at infinite cost,” a “dem 
stration of love,” —as “the modern mind” contends 
“ powerful enough to evoke penitence and faith in ma 
(p. 121). Again, it is “a demonstration of God's s 
consistency” and means “that God maintains invio 
the moral constitution of the world, taking sin as all t 
it is in the very process through which he mediates 
forgiveness to men.” We are now told that “Ge 
righteousness includes his grace,” and that “it is throt 
Christ, and specifically through his death, that we get 
knowledge of God’s character which evokes penitence : 
faith and brings the assurance of his pardon to the hee 
(p. 145). Since it is, in part at least, an assurance ¢ 
God’s character which is given in Christ’s death, it is 
dent that his teaching and life must contribute to it. 
Much of the language of the earlier books may, indeet 
be duplicated here. Physical dissolution is held to be 
to sin; death and sin are “parts or aspects of the s% 
thing” (p. 93). Hence Christ’s death is a substitute 
ours. ‘ Death was our due, and because it was ours | 
made it his.” Christ’s giving of his life means the exp 
ence of dying, and there is still the same sharp separatio 
made between his work done outside of us and its subs 
quent action upon and in us. Still, I am quite mis ake 
if either the tone of this more recent discussion, or th 
proportions of the interpretation advanced, are the sam 
as those of the earlier books. The terms seem 
hospitable, as when we are told that one is to be reckone 


1 First published as a series of articles in The Expositor, Augus 
October, 1903, and now issued in a volume (1903). 

2¢¢There is nothing which I should wish to reprobate more wh 
heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words.” 
cit., p. 69. 





MODERN PENAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 197 

i 
as “evangelical” if he “believes that God forgives only 
in a way that shows him to be irreconcilable to evil, and 
can never treat it as other or less than it is” (p. 114). 
This, certainly, is a sufficiently roomy definition. I fancy 
also that I discern here a fuller recognition of the divine 
ove and a stronger inclination to find a point of contact 
between the work of Christ and the inner life of man, — 
or, in Dr. Orr’s words, to seek the “spiritual content ” of 
Christ’s salvation. Had I not read these more recent 
utterances of Professor Denney, I should have classed him 
with the uncompromising advocates of the post-Reforma- 
ion dogma, where (An common with many others) I had 
upposed, from the study of his previous books, that he 
belonged. In view of this recent discussion, however, I 
ust question his right to a place among the few remain- 
ing representatives of the theory of vicarious punishment. 
hope that in passing this judgment I am doing him no in- 
justice. I may add that I find confirmation of the opinions 
just expressed in a review of Dr. Denney’s last book by Dr. 
B. B. Warfield,? who asserts that Dr. Denney’s exposition 
‘proceeds upon an essentially rationalistic basis,” and 
accords to the Scriptures “no real authority,” whereas, in 
tr. Warfield’s view, the only basis for a valid theory 
seems to be regarded as the “ bare authority ” of Scripture. 
do not, of course, mean to intimate that I share Dr. 
arfield’s estimate of Dr. Denney’s departures from 













thodoxy. 
_ 1A development of German theological thought closely resembling 
hat which has been traced in this chapter is illustrated in his review 
f recent discussions by F. A. B. Nitzsch, Dogmatik, pp. 483-487. Phi- 
ippi was the last representative of the old orthodoxy. It is then shown 
ow his position was modified by Thomasius, Gess, Kiihler, Frank, and 

aring, in some cases in the direction of Arminian governmentalism, by 
thers on the lines pursued by Rothe, McLeod Campbell, e¢ al. (see 
infra), but, in all cases, in the direction of a more distinctly ethical 
nterpretation. Dean Ménégoz writes me that in France ‘‘ tous nos pro- 
esseurs ont plus ou moins attenué la vieille conception orthodoxe.”’ 

2 Princeton Theological Review, October, 1904. 








CHAPTER IV 


MODERN ETHICAL SATISFACTION OR ETHICIZED GOVER! 
MENTAL THEORIES 












THE definitions of atonement which we have ju 
noticed are more or less vague on the points of differer 
between the penal and the governmental theory. Ch 
is said to have endured the wrath of God, to have suffer 
in our stead, to have died our death, or, again, to ha’ 
vindicated and satisfied the eternal law of righteousnes 
This seems to be the language of a strict penal satisfa 
tion theory, and yet one will search in vain in the 
writers for the precise premisses of that theory. The 
cussions and definitions of the divine attributes by whi 
writers like Drs. Shedd and Strong justify and, inde 
compel the conclusion that Christ suffered the full penal 
of the world’s sin, are wanting in the treatises last 
viewed. It is possible that, despite their use of per 
phraseology, their authors would have been more proper 
ranged among the successors of Grotius than among tho 
of Calvin and Turretin. Certainly they do not use the 
language adapted to describe vicarious punishment more 
freely and emphatically than Grotius himself did ; yet we 
have seen that his conception of God and his definitic 
of law and justice make it absolutely impossible to te 
his language in its strict and proper meaning. Y¥ 
imagine that the same holds true of that series 
writers, from Dr. Dale onward, whose guarded a 
sometimes equivocal statements we have had occasi 
to quote. In any case, one thing is clear: Almost all 
modern evangelical writers, whatever their particula 
shade of opinion, are disposed to qualify and tone de 
the definitions and formulas of the old theology, ey 

198 


MODERN ETHICAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 199 


where they employ some of its terms; they seldom glory 
in the claim, as earlier writers did, that theirs is the 
“leval” and “forensic” interpretation of the work of 
Christ, or assert that the determination to punish is the 
primary element in the Christian concept of God, which 
he must gratify in the sufferings of Christ before he can 
forgive. Most moderns share the conviction of Grotius 
that there is no attribute more “truly peculiar” to God 
than benevolence. 

But while the views of Grotius afforded relief from the 
positive immoralities which were defended under the 
scheme of the plenary punishment of the innocent, it has 
een commonly felt to possess a certain artificiality. It 
posited a kind of apparatus of government —a sort of 
mécanique céleste— which was described as intervening 
setween God and man and conditioning their relations. 
[t has been seen that the real problem is: How is the 
rok of Christ related to the ethical nature of God? 
Hence the tendency of recent thought has been to ethicize 
the conception of satisfaction. Not to meet the supposed 
xigencies of a moral system, but to reveal God, to express 
nd satisfy God himself in all his glorious perfections, is 
he “ objective ” aim of the work of Christ. In the present 
shapter I desire to give some illustrations of this tendency 
f thought; hence I have entitled it, Modern Ethical 
atisfaction Theories, or Ethicized Governmentalism. 
We may appropriately begin with a thinker who took 








p into his thought the elements of various theories and 
vhose suggestive treatment had the effect to stimulate 
eflection and to open the way to important modifications 
f the views current in his time; I refer to Jonathan 
idwards, Sr. There is a genuine Anselmic note in Ed- 
ards’s repeated assertion that the satisfaction must be 
ly equivalent to the sin for which it compensates. “It 
requisite that God should punish all sin with infinite 
unishment ; because all sin, as it is against God, is infi- 
itely heinous, and has infinite demerit, is justly infinitely 
ateful to him, and so stirs up infinite abhorrence and 
dignation in him. Therefore, it is requisite that God 











200 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


should punish it, unless there be something in some mes 
ure to balance this desert; either some answerable repen 
ance or sorrow for it, or other compensation.”? YV 
is the ground of this necessity? The answer given is th 
of Anselm, not that of the post-Reformation theology 
It is fit or suitable, that God should require such a sa is 
faction. This assertion occurs more than thirty times 1 
this dissertation of less than thirty pages. We find al 
Grotian elements: “God is to be considered, in this affai 
as the Supreme Regulator and Rector of the unive se 
who must “ maintain the rights of the whole” and vind 
cate his “rectoral justice.”? Although there are iso ate 
phrases in this essay which suggest penal satisfaction, it 
clear to me that this was not Edwards’s theory. When] 
comes to define the relation of Christ to sinful men, h 
illustration is drawn, not from commercial or crimin 
analogies, but from the civil and personal relations of 
patron to the clients whose case he undertakes. Chri 
indeed, “suffered the wrath of God,” but only “in su 
way as he was capable of,” and this “ way ” was twofole 
(1) He had aclear sight of the wrath and punishment whi 
sin deserved, and (2) he endured the effects of that wrat 
he suffered as if he had been the object of it. It is noti 
able that Edwards does not ground his exposition on # 
definition of retributive justice as the primary attribute 
God; but neither does he explicitly apply to the sub 
ject his own principle, elsewhere elaborated, of univer 
benevolence. In its warp and woof his essay is a com> 
bination of Anselmie and Grotian principles. In so far 
as it has points of contact with the theory of vicarid 
punishment, it displays the inconsistency inherent in th 
theory ; namely, that of laying its foundation in criminal 
law and then proving its case by appeal to civil relations. 
There are two or three suggestions in the Essay whieh 
should be noticed because of their fruitfulness in the 
thought of others. One is that sin must be satisfied for 
















1 Essay on Satisfaction for Sin in the New York ed. of Edward 
works (1864), Vol. I. p. 583. 
2 Op. cit., pp. 586, 587. 


MODERN ETHICAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 201 


either by an equivalent sorrow and repentance, or some 
| aa compensation. The former possibility Edwards 
regarded as excluded, in point of fact, since he assumed, 
_as self-evident, that repentance was possible only to those 
who have sinned, and held that all their penitence “is 
as nothing in comparison with the injury” done by sin. 
“Still, the fact that he several times mentions this possi- 
bility may indicate that it was to his mind, at least, 
abstractly conceivable. It was from this possibility, re- 
| garded as actual, that Dr. J. McLeod Campbell developed 
his theory of an adequate sorrow and repentance for sin 
offered by Christ on man’s behalf. The second sugges- 
tion of Edwards which I would note is that in Christ’s 
experience of suffering with and for sinners, accompanied, 
as it was, by an intense sense of the odiousness of sin, 
there was “an increase of the holiness of his nature” ; 
the bringing forth of the fruits of holiness “tended to 
jstrengthen and increase the root.” By this application 
of the aa that Christ was perfected through suffering 
(Heb. ii. 10), Edwards suggests the view which Rothe 
Be atoped, that Christ qualified himself by his experience 
to be the Redeemer. The third suggestion is contained 
in a strongly ethical description of the way in which 
Christ, out of love and pity, undertakes our case and be- 
comes our substitute through sympathetic identification. 
\I quote only the closing words: “A very strong and 
lively love and pity toward the miserable tends to make 
‘their case ours; as in other respects, so in this in partic- 
| alan, as it doth in our idea place us in their stead, under 
‘their misery, with a most lively, feeling sense of that 
misery, as it were feeling it for them, actually suffering it 
in their stead by strong sympathy.” ? It is evident that 
Edwards did not share the estimate of those whose test 
of insufficient ideas of substitution is that it is based in 
| “mere sympathy.” 

Want of space forbids our tracing out the development 
of the distinctions and principles of Grotius in New 
England theology. They were elaborated by Joseph Bel- 


1 Op. cit., pp. 604, 605. 














202 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 















lamy (1719-1790), Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803), Jol 
Smalley (1734-1820), Stephen West (1735-1819), Jor 
than Edwards, Jr. (1745-1801), Nathaniel Emmons (174 
1840), and others. Only the briefest summary of the 
principles of the Edwardean school can be given, am 
that can best be done in the words of Professor Parl 
“(1) Our Lord suffered pains which were substituted for 
the penalty of the law, and may be called punishment 

the more general sense of that word, but were not, strict 
and literally, the penalty which the law had threatened, 
(2) The sufferings of our Lord satisfied the general jt 
tice of God, but did not satisfy his distributive justi 
(3) The humiliation, pains, and death of our Redeem 
were equivalent in meaning to the punishment threaten 
in the moral law, and thus they satisfied him who is de 
termined to maintain the honor of this law, but they | d 
not satisfy the demands of this law itself for our punis 
ment. (4) The active obedience, viewed as the holines 
of Christ was honorable to the law, but was not a work 
of supererogation, performed by our substitute, and thi 
transferred and imputed to us, so as to satisfy the requi 
tions of the law for our own active obedience. (5) T 
law and the distributive justice of God, although honored 
by the life and death of Christ, will yet eternally demand 
the punishment of every one who has sinned. (6) The 
atonement rendered it consistent and desirable for Got 
to save all who exercise evangelical faith, yet it did not 
render it obligatory on him, in distributive justice, to sa 
them. (7) The atonement was designed for the welfa 
of all men; to make the eternal salvation of all men pos: 
sible; to remove all the obstacles which the honor of the 
law and of distributive justice presented against the salya- 
tion of the non-elect as well as the elect. (8) The atone 
ment does not constitute the reason why some men are 
regenerated, and others not, but this reason is found on 
in the sovereign, electing will of God. ‘Even so, Father 
for so it seemed good in thy sight.’ (9) The atoneme 
is useful on men’s account, and in order to furnish ne 
motives to holiness, but it is necessary on God’s account 


| = MODERN ETHICAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 203 


| « 
and in order to enable him, as a consistent Ruler, to 
| pardon any, even the smallest sin, and therefore to bestow 
| on sinners any, even the smallest, favor.” 1 It was common 
for the members of this school to distinguish three senses of 
the word “justice”: (1) commutative justice, which has 
reference to property and the payment of debts; (2) dis- 
tributive justice, which relates to the punishment of crimes; 
-and (3) general, public, or rectoral justice, by which is 
meant God’s goodness in general, his regard for the good 
|of the universe. Not in the first two senses, but only in 
the third, is justice satisfied by the death of Christ. 
}“This is done by the death of Christ, which supports the 
authority of the law, and renders it consistent with the 
glory of God and the good of the whole system, to pardon 
| the sinner.” ? 
We will next illustrate the more recent applications of 
this general conception. Dr. Samuel Harris presents a 
governmental view of atonement, ethically interpreted. 
He declares that the universal religion “ must satisty the 
demands of the sinner’s own reason and conscience, in his 
fensciousness of deserving God’s displeasure, by presenting 
'God’s revelation of himself as redeeming men from sin in 
‘such a way that in the very act of seeking the sinner to 
Bye him from his sin, he asserts and maintains the law, 
‘manifests his compassion and mercy in harmony with right- 
/eousness, and makes atonement for the sinner while for- 
‘giving him.” Applying this general principle to the 
work of Christ, Dr. Harris says: ‘“ He, in his humiliation 
and in all his earthly life, obeyed the law of love in per- 
fect self-renunciation through sufferings unspeakable, and 
‘eyen unto death on the cross, to bring men back to rec- 
‘onciliation with God. Thus he revealed the law of love 
more fully than it had ever been revealed before, and fully 
asserted and maintained the righteousness of God and the 
universal obligation and inviolable authority of the law of 
love at every step in the eae of men and in the for- 











1 Introductory Essay, pp. x, xi 
2 Jonathan Edwards, Jr., The Atonement, ed. by E. A. Park, i 38. 
* God the Creator and Lord of All, IL. 380. 


204 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


giveness of sin. And thus he made atonement for sin a: 
guilt.”! But Dr. Harris insists that this work of Chri 
is according to God’s nature and method and is grounde 
in principles universally valid and applicable: There 
no “introduction of any new principle into the action ¢ 
God and his revelation of himself therein. It is simpl 
the revelation, in its highest form in Christ, of the divin 
love as good-will or benevolence, and also as righteousnes 
in conforming with law and maintaining its authorit 
which appear in all God’s revelation of himself in hi 
moral government of rational persons.” 2 These are rathe 
formal statements, but at least these four notes, not prom 
inent in the “historic theories,” are heard in them 
(1) Christ’s sufferings and death are regarded as of 
piece with his life-work in general ; 3 (2) the atonement is 
conceived as one with all God’s revealing and saving wor 
in history ; (3) the law which is satisfied by Christ is th 
law of love, alike in its benevolent and in its righteot 
aspect, and (4) God is satisfied not by being acted upor 
appeased or propitiated, but by acting out his nat 
in holy love and sacrifice, by expressing and realizing 
humanity his own moral perfections. As compared wit 
that of Anselm, Hodge, or even Grotius, this is a net 
world. It is a world of moral reality instead of one 
mathematical equivalences, legal fictions, and governmental 
exigencies. 
Professor Lewis F. Stearns has expounded our subject 
in the method and spirit of Grotius, to whom, as we haye 
seen, substitution meant, not a substitution of Christ's 
punishment for the sinner’s punishment, but the substitu- 
tion of his sufferings for punishment. God, says Dr 
Stearns, is holy love and in the work of saving men he 
must safeguard his righteousness, or self-respect, as well as 
express his benevolence. This was done through Christ 
entering into the keenest realization of the nature and 



















1 Op. cit., II. 345. 2 Op. cit., Il. 378, 374. 
8 Earlier writers frequently represented the atoning work of Christ as 
consisting ‘‘ wholly in his suffering unto death.’’ So Hopkins, Works, 
I. 328. ’ 


MODERN ETHICAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 205 


effects of sin. “In so far as he shared in those corpo- 
rate evils which are a divine punishment of sin, a kind 
of objectivized divine displeasure, he felt himself under 
punishment.” ? In his union with sinners it was as if 
God’s displeasure rested upon him. “He put himself, so 
far as was possible for a sinless One, into the sinner’s place, 
where he could realize the greatness of human sin and of 
the divine displeasure which visits sin with punishment.” ? 
In the view of Dr. Stearns death in itself has no atoning 
power, nor is the dignity of Christ’s person to be regarded 
as giving to his death a value or weight by which it is 
made to balance the debt or quantity of the world’s sin. 
Atonement is in its essence moral and spiritual. The 
‘saying value of Christ’s death lay in its spirit and purpose. 
The “reparation” consisted in the laying of his will as 
a holy offering on the divine altar. But how did this 
obedience and self-surrender stand related to that vindi- 
eation of divine righteousness which was required? Dr. 
Stearns replies that in this self-surrender Christ “ acknowl- 
edged the divine justice in the punishment of sin and sought 
the divine forgiveness,” that Christ “endured the death 
which is the common doom, and by so doing rendered to 
}God the spiritual reparation which was due from man, 
laba without which God could not justify and forgive the 
sinner.”? But Christ was not punished. ‘He took upon 
‘din that consequence of sin which to others is punish- 
ment.” ‘We speak of his vicarious death, but the vica- 
riousness lay rather in the spiritual sacrifice to God, of 
which the death was the vehicle and expression, than in 
‘the death itself. He was not our Substitute in punish- 
ment, but our Substitute in atonement.” 4 

These statements will, I think, strike most readers as 
somewhat formal in their character. There is little, if 
any, effort made to show how the Christ whom we know 
in history and in experience really and concretely accom- 
lished for us the reparation described. But, perhaps, one 
hould not look for this in a brief and theoretic statement. 


| 1 Present-Day Theology, p. 391. 2 Op. cit., p. 393. 
| 










== 


i et eR 


3 Op. cit., pp. 398, 394. * Op. cit., p. 394. 


206 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


The elements of which the theory is composed are obyio 
enough. It repudiates all ideas of vicarious punishmen 
of an imputation of guilt to Christ, and of an equation b 
tween his sufferings and our penalty. It thus rejects th 
post-Reformation dogma and departs from the equiv: 
lence-schemes of Anselm and of Edwards. Its positi 
features are: the saving value of Christ’s death not to 
found in the death itself, but in certain moral and spirit 
acts and qualities lying behind the experience of dying 
an acute realization of the hatefulness of sin whereby i 
guilt was acknowledged, and a consequent experience 
the corporate evils which flow from sin and which for si 
ners have the character of punishment. Here we note am 
echo of what Edwards called a “ strong and lively love and 
pity toward the miserable,” and in the “acknowleds 
ment” of the evil of sin and the “seeking of the divi 
forgiveness” an approximation to Dr. Campbell’s idea 
a vicarious repentance or expiatory confession. But he 
this experience of Christ should remove the obstacle 
forgiveness and open the way to an exercise of grace 
which was impossible before, is not so clear. On thea 
sumption (which Dr. Stearns shares) that God’s grace we 
impeded by his righteousness, of which some assertion 
must be made before grace could operate, the penal vie 
is clearer at this crucial point. There what needed to be 
done in view of sin was done; here it was as if it were 
done ; something else was done which is declared to at 
swer equally well. But in so far as the same assumptions 
are common to both theories, it is incumbent on the goy- 
ernmental theory to show that this substitute for penalty 
does really meet its ends—that something which is not 
punishment is equally as good as punishment for its pur- 
pose. I venture to think that here is the point where the 
burden of proof presses hardest upon theories like that of 
Dr. Stearns ; it is at this point that the case is made 0} 
by an “as if” or “as it were.” I suggest the questior 
whether a theory like that under review can successful 
retain, in its premisses, so much common ground with the 
penal view without a nearer approach to its conclusion; 
















MODERN ETHICAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 207 


in other words, whether the modern governmental inter- 
pretation can successfully parry the arguments for vicari- 
ous punishment without a more thorough revision of its 
Own presuppositions. But this is by the way. 

In the essay on atonement in the volume entitled Pro- 
gressive Orthodoxy, President George Harris has given an 
interpretation of Christ’s mediation which seeks to do 
justice to both its subjective and its objective factors. In 
discussing the relation of Christ to the forgiveness of sins, 
he contends that men have not the power or inclination to 

‘repent apart from the revelation of God in Christ. He 
then develops the conception of Christ’s identification of 
himself with us in virtue of which he brings men to his 
own estimate and feeling concerning sin. “The race of 
‘men with Christ in it is essentially different in fact, and 
therefore in the sight of God, from the same race without 
| Christ in it.” “ The race may be conceived as approach- 
ing God, and signifying its penitence by pointing to 
Christ, and by giving expression in him to repentance 
which no words could utter.” ‘He is the Amen of hu- 
/manity to the righteousness of God’s law, to the ill desert 
of sin, to the justice of God’s judgments.” “ Christ’s suf- 
fering and sympathizing with men is able to awaken in 
them and express for them a real repentance.” “In union 
| with Christ man adopts the feeling of Christ concerning 
sin against the God of love.” ‘Christ’s sacrifice avails 
with ped because it is adapted to bring man to repent- 
ance.” Substitution means, “the race with Christ in it 
substituted for the race without Christ in it” (pp. 52-56). 
Tt will be noticed that these expressions bear a general 
resemblance to those of Dr. McLeod Campbell. 

If, now, we approach the subject from the divine side, 
we see “that the sufferings and death of his only Son 
| realize God’s hatred of sin and the righteous authority of 
the law; therefore punishment need not be exacted.” 
God can never be “indifferent to sin in saving man from 
punishment.” But we gain the full meaning of this truth 
only when we “goon to the fact that Christ makes real 
very much more than God’s righteous indignation against 










H 








208 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 























sin.” That would not be enough; a mere manifestatio 
of indignation against sin could no more save men thal 
punishment could save them. We must see that “th 
wrath of God is only a manifestation of the love of God 
since God cannot allow the sinner to be blessed in his sin.’ 
“In Christ God can come to man in another relation, 
cause Christ is a new divine power in the race to turn i 
away from sin unto God.” What, asks Dr. Harris, is the 
greatest punishment of sin? Is it not separation fror 
God? Does not Christ, then, avert the penalty of sit 
when he so brings the knowledge and love of God to met 
that it is no longer necessary that they should suffer al 
the consequences of sin? ‘The ethical ends of punish 
ment are more than realized in the pain and death of th 
Redeemer, through whom man is brought to repentance.’ 
“Except for Christ God could only punish sinners b 
withdrawing himself more and more from them ; but ii 
Christ their repentance and renewal become possible, ant 
God can bring them to their true destination. The ra Cr 
is other to God than it could be without Christ, and Got 
is other to the race than he could be without Christ 
That is, Christ is the Mediator between God and man.’ 
“ But the work originates with God. It is therefore the 
final fact that God is reconciled to man, and therefore még 
is reconciled to God.” Hence it is “on account of Chri 
that God can forgive, on account of Christ that men am 
not left helpless and condemned under the necessities of 
unchangeable law.” “ The sacrifice of Christ is thus ai 
indispensable condition of the forgiveness of sin” (pp. 
57-62). Perhaps one might summarize this view by say- 
ing that God satisfies himself in that approach which he 
makes to man in Christ whereby his holy love is most 
fully revealed, and whereby sinful man is drawn into 
fellowship of life with himself. The theory obviously 
discards all notions of vicarious punishment, imputation, 
and equivalence, and avoids such conceptions as that of 
homage to law or government. It construes atonement ¢ ; 
a method of mediation between the personal God and sin= 
ful man. The method is determined by the nature of God 


- 
CD 


MODERN ETHICAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 209 





_as holy love and by the end sought — the bringing of man 
into the life of holy love. Nothing else but the accom- 
-plishment of his holy and gracious purpose in bringing 
man into fellowship with himself could ever “satisfy ” 
God. 

We turn next to a series of British writers of various 
schools, arranging them not in chronological order, but 
with general reference to the degree of their departure, in 
their language at least, from the older definitions of satis- 
faction. We begin with the late Bishop Arthur Lyttelton, 
the author of the essay on Atonement in Lux Mundi. The 
sacrifice of Christ is held to have been both a propitiation 
and a satisfaction. In what sense? Answer: Christ’s 
death “ became a propitiation in that he, the self-chosen 
_yictim, by his acceptance of it, recognized the righteousness 
of the law which was vindicated on the cross” (p. 290). 
What gave his death “ propitiatory value” was his “ per- 
| fect obedience,” his “spirit of sacrifice.” Bishop Lyttel- 
ton holds that not physical but spiritual death —‘“ the 
Consciousness of separation from the life of God” — is 
| the penalty of sin, therefore it was necessary for Christ 
as man’s substitute to experience, in addition to the tor- 
tures of the cross, “the withdrawal of God’s presence.” 
This author. also lays stress upon the idea that Christ was 
our representative, and declares that “the atonement did 
not consist in the substitution of his punishment for ours, 
but in his offering the sacrifice which man had neither 
purity nor power to offer” (p. 298). ‘The beginning 
and the end of the atonement is the love of God; the 
death of Christ was not the cause, but the revelation of 
that love” (p. 807). The author holds that “our Lord 
did endure the very sufferings which are, in sinners, the 
_ penalties of sin”; but he denies that these are properly called 
penal, and that there is any “quantitative relation” be- 
tween them and our punishment (p. 309). “Sufferings 
borne in the wrong spirit, unsubmissively or without recog- 
nition of their justice, are penal ; but the spirit of humility 
and obedience makes them remedial and purgatorial” 
-(@. 310). The strict law of retribution was therefore 





SE 








. 


210 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 














not carried out. “The atonement undoubtedly tran: 
gresses the strict law of retribution ; but all forgivenes 
transgresses it” (p. 502). The relation of atonement t 
man’s moral reformation—its “subjective” aspect — is alsi 
recognized. ‘ No forgiveness is conceivable which does no 
in some degree relieve the offender of the consequence 
of his offence” (p. 301). There is an aspect of Christ’ 
redemptive work in which it “ effects our reunion with Gor 
by delivering us from the power of sin, and by filling us witl 
the divine gift of life.” This was, indeed, “ the conceptio 
of our Lord’s work which was chiefly in the minds of th 
early Christian writers” (p. 298). It is even said to b 
“the fault of much popular theology” that it negleets 
this aspect of the subject. 

These scattered sentences are, of course, inadequate (a 
in previous cases) to represent the author’s thought; but 
I trust they do not misrepresent it. In all these brie 
expositions the aim is to select the statements which wil 
best illustrate the author’s principles ; his application and 
defence of them it is impossible to reproduce in detail. 
should say that in Bishop Lyttelton’s essay we have 
substantial parallel to the theory current in the oldei 
New England theology. The strict law of retribution 
not enforced on Christ; that is, “ retributive justice” i 
not satisfied. Yet he endures the sufferings which it 
sinners would be punishment. What is this but the Gro 
tian idea of a “penal example”? The essay deals mostly 
with the objective side of atonement, but it recognizes 
fact that there is another side. No propitiation woule 
save us if Christ did not really bring us to God in loy 
and trust. We must recognize in this discussion an effort 
to show that atonement was not merely a matter of ap 
peasing wrath or satisfying for sin, but that it was 
method of saving men by bringing God and men in 
union and harmony. God is not satisfied except by rea 
saving us. 

In his treatise entitled Zhe Spiritual Prineiple of th 
Atonement, the Rev. John Scott Lidgett has a chapte 


1 London, 1898. 


4 


it MODERN ETHICAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 211 


} 
tT. 
;é 


“ The Satisfaction of God.” The notion of satisfaction 
is interpreted, however, not from the standpoint of offended 
dignity or governmental necessity, but from that of God’s 
fatherhood. “The fundamental condition of fatherly 
satisfaction is, that it shall satisfy the fatherly by perfect- 
ing the filial.” It is necessary to such a satisfaction that 
ithe holiness of God and the heinousness of sin should be 
recognized and manifested. Christ so accomplishes this 
object as to satisfy both God and man (p. 302). “ Atone- 
ment to fatherhood lies in restored, realized, and mani- 
fested sonship. That restored sonship is brought about 
by homage to the violated law, in submission to the pun- 

ishment which expresses the mind of the Father and 
asserts the supremacy of the law” (pp. 269, 270). Mr. 
lidgett speaks of Christ as living under “ penal condi- 
tions ” and as suffering the “ penal consequences ” of sin; 
but he does not regard this as the primary aspect of his 
saving work. It is only its negative side. The idea that 
« Christ suffered the penalty of sin, therefore I shall not,” is 
pronounced a “ miserably inadequate representation of the 
atonement.” “Sin must be annulled if the condemnation 
and the consequences of sin are to be annulled” (p. 272). 
The essence of atonement lies in its spiritual significance ; 
& carries us into “a region higher than the consequences 
of sin and wrath, to make Ratinfaetion to that spiritual order 
of love and righteousness which has been set at naught 
and, so far as sin can effect it, destroyed ; -it must annul 
sin and all the works of sin” (p. 271). These few extracts 
give a very inadequate idea of the discussion, but will, I 
trust, serve to illustrate the author’s method and princi- 
ples. I should say that Mr. Lidgett has presented an 
ethicized governmental theory ; God i is conceived not asa 
Civil Ruler, but as a Father ; his relation to men is pater- 
nal, and the aim of Christ’s work is to recover men to the 
cs life. 
We turn next to the theory of Dr. J. McLeod Camp- 
i As has been indicated, he takes his starting-point 


1See The Nature of the Atonement. Sixth ed. London and New 
York, 1895. 


rea 


Tig, THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 




















from the suggestion of Edwards that an adequate reper 
ance (deemed by him to be impossible) would be a suf 
cient satisfaction for sin.! Dr. Campbell maintained th 
Christ had offered to God, on behalf of humanity, th 
requisite repentance, and so fulfilled the conditions | 
forgiveness. The theory is thus expressed: “ Forgivene 
must precede atonement; the atonement must be 
form of the manifestation of the forgiving love of 
not its cause” (p. 16). Now Christ entered into a “ pe: 
fect sympathy in the Father’s condemnation of sin, 
endured “sufferings which are themselves the expressi¢ 
of the divine mind regarding our sins, and a manifestati 
by the Son of what our sins are to the Father’s heart 
(pp. 113, 114). Thus his sufferings were not penal, bu 
were “the perfecting of the Son’s witnessing for th 
Father” (p. 114). “That oneness of mind with th 
Father, which toward man took the form of condemnati 
of sin, would in the Son’s dealing with the Father in relatic 
to our sins, take the form of a perfect confession of our si 
This confession as to its own nature must have been 
perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the 8 
of man.” 2 ‘That response” (which Christ makes to 
divine wrath against sin) “has all the elements of a pei 
fect repentance in humanity for all the sin of man,— 
perfect sorrow—a perfect contrition —all the elements of 
such a repentance, and that in absolute perfection, a 
—except the personal consciousness of sin; and in th 
perfect response in Amen to the mind of God in relation 
sin is the wrath of God rightly met, and that is accordé 
to divine justice which is its due, and could alone satis 
it” .Cpp. ELT; 408). 
It will be seen that Dr. Campbell held a doctrine of 
satisfaction to the divine anger against sin, but it was 2 


1It is hardly correct to say, as is often done, that Campbell « 
his idea of an ‘equivalent repentance’’ from Edwards. He says, 
expression of Edwards “suggested to me that that earnest and de 
thinker had really been on the verge of that conception of a moral ai 
spiritual atonement which was occupying my own thoughts.’ Op. 
pp. 3438, 344. 

2 Pp. 116,117. Ihave italicized the most characteristic words. 


MODERN ETHICAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 213 


a penal satisfaction; it was a satisfaction by a vicarious 
repentance, an expiatory sorrow and confession, offered to 
God for and in humanity by humanity’s Head and Repre- 
sentative. He believed this to be a far profounder view 
of satisfaction than the conception of a vicarious punish- 
ment. ‘There is much less spiritual apprehension neces- 
sary to the faith that God punishes sin, than to the faith 
that our sins do truly grieve God. Therefore, men more 
easily believe that Christ’s sufferings show how God can 
punish sin than that these sufferings are the divine feel- 
ings in relation to sin, made visible to us by being present 
‘in suffering flesh. Yet, however the former may terrify, 
the latter alone can purify” (p. 121). “ We feel that 
such a repentance as we are supposing” (that is, a repent- 


| 


ance ideally perfect) ‘“‘ would be the true and proper satis- 
faction to offended justice, and that there would be more 
atoning worth in one tear of the true and perfect sorrow 
than in endless ages of penal woe” (p. 125). There was a 
perfect response made by Christ to the feeling of God con- 
cerning sin. This was made for us by virtue of his union 
with us. Now as he thus said Amen to God’s just judg- 
Ment upon sin, so we must, in faith, say Amen to this 
‘condemnation of sin in the soul of Christ. “ What I thus 
labored to impress on the mind of my reader is, that the 
necessity for the atonement which we are contemplating 
was moral and spiritual, arising out of our relation to God 
as the Father of our spirits, and not merely legal, arising 
out of our being under the law ” (pp. 160, 161). 
We have already had occasion to note evidences of the 
influence upon later writers of this suggestive treatment 
of atonement. Its service has certainly been great in 
paving the way from legal to ethical interpretations. The 
ost obvious question which it suggests is: Is it not as 
impossible for an innocent person to repent on behalf of the 
uilty as to be punished instead of the guilty? Is there not 
omething incongruous and misleading in the terms “ vi- 
arious repentance” and “‘expiatory confession”? They 
ave naturally given rise, in some minds, to the impression 
hat Dr. Campbell’s doctrine was that of an atonement as 



























214 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


completely “outside of us” and as completely dissociatec 
from our moral life, as the earlier theories conceived it to 
be. But this impression is certainly unwarranted. What 
justification it has lies in an infelicitous phraseology and, 
as Dr. Moberly has pointed out, in the fact that Dr. Camp 
bell “discerned with more complete success the nature of 
the relation of Christ to God than that of the relation of 
men to Christ.” Though not failing altogether at this 
point, he still left Christ too much outside our humanity 
instead of regarding him as “ the very manifestation of our 
humanity, in its ideal reality of penitential holiness, before 
the Father.” ? 

The work of Professor Moberly, to which reference has 
just been made, is wrought out on the lines laid down by 
Dr. McLeod Campbell. The death of Christ is viewed a 
the necessary climax of his life (p. 112). In life and 
death he took the position of a “voluntary penitent, 
wholly one with the righteousness of God in the sacrifice 
of himself” (p. 110). Effectual atonement for sin require 
two things, a perfect penitence and a perfect holiness 
“If,” says Dr. Moberly, “my repentance, in reference 
to the past, could be quite perfect, such penitence woul 
mean that my personality was once more absolutely on 
with righteousness in condemning sin even in, and 
at the cost of, myself. Such personal re-identity with 
righteousness, if it were possible, would be a real contra 
diction of my past. It would be atonement, and I shoule 
in it, be once more actually righteous” (p. 110). But te 


1 Atonement and Personality, pp. 402-405. It should here be pointed 
out, however, that Dr. Moberly objects only to the phrase, ‘* expiatory 
confession of our sins,’’ not to the terms ‘‘ a perfect repentance,” ** a per 
fect sorrow,”’ ‘‘a perfect contrition,” offered by Christ on our behalf. 
This author himself, as we shall see, holds to the realization by Christ 
of ‘‘a perfect penitence’ or ‘‘ penitential holiness’ in and for humanity 
His really serious objection relates to the other point mentioned above 
Dr. Moberly himself adopts the phrase, ‘* Christ confessed the sin of 
humanity,”’ not externally, but ‘‘ by being the very manifestation of hu- 
manity ’ (p. 405). But what is this but what Dr. Campbell meant p 
‘‘a perfect repentance in humanity,’’ a ‘* confession of sin in humanity,” 
‘a perfect Amen in humanity to the judgment of God on the sin Of 
man.’? The Nature of the Atonement, pp. 117, 119. 


MODERN ETHICAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 215 


Xperience any such atoning, effectual repentance and so 
o re-identify ourselves perfectly with righteousness is, 
or us, impossible. Now this is what Christ does for us 
nd by his Spirit helps us to do for ourselves. 

But here we meet the objection previously noticed: Is 
ot penitence correlative to personal sin? Can one re- 
ent of any sin but his own? So far from allowing that 
his objection is valid, Dr. Moberly maintains that “ peni- 
ence, in the perfectness of its full meaning, is not even 
onceivably possible, except it be to the personally sin- 
ess” (p. 117). Penitence in its truest, deepest meaning 
; not merely or mainly regret or remorse or a feeling of 
uilt; it is “self-identity with righteousness.” Now it 
sa fact of life that the blameless do suffer and sorrow on 
half of the sinful far more deeply and keenly than the 
inful do on their own behalf (p. 118). The possibility 
f this vicarious suffering and penitence is grounded, in 
art, in the nature of sympathy and, in part, in the purity 
f the sufferer which is the very condition of his realizing 
he real nature of sin. The sinner himself does not, and 
annot, realize it. The very fact that he has sinned, and 
nat the sin has passed into his character, dulls the edge 
his penitence and dims its truth (p. 122). Now among 
1en all such vicarious penitence is imperfect ; it could be 
erfect only in one who had a full realization of the char- 
ster and consequences of sin; that is, to a being himself 
less and possessing an unclouded vision of the holiness 
f God (p. 127). It is only Christ who, in the union 
ith man made possible by infinite love, is able, by virtue 
his own sinless holiness and consequent sense of the 
il of sin, to make that supreme acknowledgment of 
n’s ill desert and offer that perfect homage to righteous- 
ss which is required from our sinful race (p. 128). 
The suffering involved in this,” continues Dr. Moberly, 
is not, in him, punishment, or the terror of punishment ; 
tit is the full realizing, in the personal consciousness, 
the truth of sin, and the disciplinary pain of the con- 
est of sin; it is that full self-identification of human 
ture, within range of sin’s challenge and sin’s scourge, 














216 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 
















with holiness as the divine condemnation of sin, whi 
was at once the necessity —and the impossibility 
human penitence” (p. 130).! 

For a fuller explanation of the author’s meaning in t 
somewhat unusual use of terms the reader must const 
the opening chapters of Dr. Moberly’s book, where th 
ideas of punishment, penitence, and forgiveness are st 
jected to a penetrating analysis. It is equally importa 
for understanding how the author conceives of this aton 
ing penitence as availing for us, to read the chapters fol 
lowing that from which I have quoted (ch. vi), on t 
subjective and objective aspects of atonement, the w 
of the Holy Spirit, and the nature and relations of h 
personality. I regret that I have only been able to gi 
a somewhat formal definition of this suggestive expositi¢ 
The kinship of the author’s theory with that of Dr. Camj 
bell and, indirectly at least, with some parts of the ess 
of Edwards on Satisfaction, will, I am sure, be evident 
the reader.? 

As Mr. Lidgett developed his doctrine of satisfactio 
accord with the emphasis placed by Jesus himself, as 
modern theology, upon the fatherhood of God, so has th 
Rey. W. L. Walker, in The Cross and the Kingdom,’ i 
terpreted the saving work of Christ in the light of on 
of his own dominant conceptions — that of the Kingd 
of God. No circumstance could better illustrate the di 
ference between the ancient and the modern method 0 

1 Mr. Walker objects to the application of the term “ penitence 


Christ as strenuously as Dr. Moberly objected to Dr. Campbell’s si 
use of the term ‘“‘ confession.”? ‘‘ Penitence,”’ he says, ‘‘is not concei 


tion of himself with sinful humanity could not go so far as to create tl 
feelings implied in real penitence.’? This author prefers the ter 
‘‘acknowledgment’’; Christ acknowledged, on behalf of humanity, 
ill desert of sin. The Cross and the Kingdom, p. 229. 

2%In this brief reference to Dr. Moberly’s work I have sou 
touch upon what seems to be the dominant note of his book. But I fin 
it impossible to extract from the volume as a whole any self-consiste! 
general view of our subject. The composite character of the author 
opinions has been exhibited by Dr. H. Rashdall in The Journal of 
logical Studies for 1902, pp. 178-211. 

8 Edinburgh, 1902. 


MODERN ETHICAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 217 


lealing with this subject than the use in this connection 
yf these favorite conceptions of Jesus. The idea of God's 
atherhood, and the great primary aim of Jesus to found 
ind foster the Kingdom of the Godlike on earth, have 
ittle or no place in the “ historic theories ” of his mission. 
God is, for them, a feudal Lord, a moral Governor, an 
Administrator of criminal law, and Christ’s work is to 
;quare accounts with him, — by some homage or suffering 
yr punishment to quench his resentment so as to clear the 
way for a possible remission of penalty. All this seems 
(o Mr. Walker, as to most modern theologians, too abstract 
ind theoretic, too remote from the thought and purpose 
of Jesus, to satisfy “the modern mind” religiously or the 
uistorical spirit theoretically.1 He declares that “the 
ross was the result and the expression of forgiveness in 
he divine fatherly heart, not in any sense its cause — the 
sround (or perhaps we should rather say the means) of 
t proclamation of the divine forgiveness, not the ground 
vf that forgiveness itself” (p. 199). 

It would be interesting to analyze this author’s exposi- 
bon in detail ; but since that is impracticable, I will select 
few sentences which will illustrate his point of view and 
me of his governing principles: “ To forgive men with- 
‘ut impressing on them the evil of sin so as to save them 
om it, would harm them rather than bless them” (p. 
(21). Death came to Christ “in order that the evil of sin 
d its evil consequences might be fully manifested and 
pressed on the consciences of men” (p. 224). “If sin 
aused such suffering to the most righteous person — even 
the Son of God himself — how aL how hideous it must 
. (p. 225) !2 “ That which Christ endured came upon 












1“ There are not wanting serious signs that the old juridical language 
ils to appeal as it once did to the spiritual consciousness of a large sec- 
m of Christian believers. It sounds artificial ; it stands aloof from the 
minant ideas of the time; there is not a little in it which shocks the 
oral sense of many devout minds that are earnestly desirous of arriving 
something like a consistent theory of the atonement.’’ E. Griffith- 
mes in The Ascent through Christ, p. 289. 

\2 Cf. Dr. J. T. Hutcheson: ‘‘He condemned sin by his death 
-indeed, by allowing it to condemn itself. Just as some atrocious act 


218 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 






















him in his fidelity to his mission to establish the Kingdom 
God. But he accepted the suffering that so came upon h 
with a direct relation to sin, . . . and it was so orde: 
that he passed through such an experience as sets forth 
us what sin really is and what it deserves before God 
awakening our consciences to see, in what Christ suffer 
that which sin really deserves to suffer, and must suffe 
(p. 231). “The very life of God, as that of perf 
Love, is a life of constant sacrifice” (p. 268). “ 
cross outside of us, while it brings divine forgiveness, ¢ 
only save us as it becomes the cross within our own s¢ 
on which we are crucified with Christ” (p. 280). It 
evident that, according to this theory, we should see i 
the work of Christ a satisfaction to the moral pert 
tions of God through his achieving the purpose of © 
holy love to win men to fellowship of life with him 
in his Kingdom. 
In common with a considerable number of moc 
writers,! Principal A. M. Fairbairn frankly adopts the 
called “ Patripassian heresy ” and expounds the atonem 
in the light of it. “Theology,” he says, “has no fe 
idea than that of the impassibility of God. If he is 
pable of sorrow, he is capable of suffering ; and were 
without the capacity for either, he would be without 
feeling of the evil of sin or the misery of man.”? 
Fairbairn further holds that the end of God’s judgme 
is not merely penal or retributive, but “ corrective, reel: 
atory, and disciplinary.” Now in Christ the feeling 
God toward sin is revealed, and men are made to sharei 
The sufferings and death of Christ “are a revelation 


of wrong, of violence, or of shame condemns crime, in the eyes of me 
by showing them what crime can do, so he allowed sin to condemn 
by showing forever what sin can do.” A View of the Atonement, Pp. 
New York, 1897. 

1 E.g. Drs. Horace Bushnell and Roswell D. Hitchcock. The | 
writes: ‘* What right has any one to say that God is passionless ? ~ 
himself has never said it. He is not passionless. Like the sun, he 
aflame. God feels rebellion, and has always felt it. His agony ove! 
is eternal.’ Eternal Atonement, pp. 10, 11. 

2 The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, p. 483. 























MODERN ETHICAL SATISFACTION THEORIES 219 


sin as well as of God ; they show it as nothing else could 
have done. And revelation is here judgment; for sin 
to be discovered is to be condemned” (p. 485). “The 
atonement burns into the soul of the sinner the sense of 
the evil and the shame of sin, forces him to look at it with 
God’s eyes, to judge it with his conscience, to hate it with 
his hate —in a word, to change his own attitude to it for 
God’s. And when this is the case the sinner is saved, but 
so saved that his salvation is the supreme victory of right- 
eousness and sovereignty as well as of love and grace” 
(p. 483). Itis obvious that we have here the elements 
of an ethical interpretation. “ Whatever the death of 
Christ may signify,” says Dr. Fairbairn elsewhere, “ it 
does not mean an expedient for quenching the wrath of 
God, or for buying off man from his vengeance.” 4 

In concluding this sketch of that group of theories 
which I have designated by the words “ethical satisfac- 
tion,” I would call attention to the latest treatise on Sys- 
tematic Theology which has fallen under my notice, that 
of Professor Henry C. Sheldon.? The theory of atone- 
ment advocated by Dr. Sheldon might, I think, be de- 
scribed as a thoroughly ethicized governmentalism. I 
quote a few sentences which may serve as hints of the 
view taken. The objective element in the atonement 
means “the conditioning agency of the divine holiness 
and justice upon the method of the divine love” (p. 405). 
* We may think of the work of Christ as having objective 
worth, not indeed as giving God an incentive to be gra- 
cious, but as providing a fit method for the dispensation 
of his grace in a world-embracing economy” (p. 410). 
“There is no occasion for a disjunction between the per- 
sonal and the governmental in God” (p. 408). “Love 
and righteousness admit of no divorce in the practically 
efficient scheme” (p. 410). “One self-consistent disposi- 
tion in God is to be regarded as back of his entire dealing 
with the race” (p. 411). Christ’s work was God’s “ self- 


1 The Philosophy of the Christian Religion, p. 500. 
2 System of Christian Doctrine, by Henry C. Sheldon, Professor of 
Theology in Boston University. Cincinnati and New York, 1903. 


920 ‘THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE De OTR 

4 
consistent procedure for producing repentance 
istering grace,” and it was the ethical elements in t 
work which were efficacious in meeting both the subjec 
tive and the objective demands of the case (pp. 411, 412) 
Thus the work of Christ “renders special tribute to t 
ethical nature and government of God” (p. 412). 





CHAPTER V 
MODERN “SUBJECTIVE” THEORIES 


WE turn next to a series of attempts to construe the 
york of Christ as an actual saving power directly operat- 
ng upon human life and, accordingly, to interpret his 
ath, primarily, as a factor in his influence upon the 
oral life of the world. These theories speak not of a 
ropitiation or satisfaction of God by sacrifice, but of a 
velation of God in sacrifice. They say that God does 
ot need to be reconciled to man; it is man who needs to 
e reconciled to God. 

It is common for those who maintain that God required 
satisfaction for sin —or, at least, that he was obliged to 
fiopt measures whereby his attitude or relation toward 
ae sinful race might be changed—to characterize the 
fs to which I have referred as “subjective,” “ man- 
ard,” or “moral influence” theories. The claim is that 
aey represent the work of Christ as effecting a change 
nly in man’s attitude to God, and not also in God’s atti- 
ide to man; it influences man but does not influence 
-od because it does not act upon him, but proceeds from 
im, and expresses his nature and feeling. The objection 
fade to these theories is that they argue (as did Augus- 
ne): How could God send his Son to die for us if he 
ere not already reconciled in his feeling toward us?? 
-Owever various and mutually contradictory the theories 








1“Christ was not in the world reconciling God to men, but God was in 
rist reconciling the world to himself. Christ does not commend his 
eto us over against the justice and displeasure of God, but God com- 
nds his own love to us in that when we were yet sinners, Christ died 
us.” Professor F. C. Porter in the American Journal of Theology, 
nuary, 1904, p. 14. 

2 On the Trinity, Bk. XIII. ch. xi. 

221 








222 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 




















as to the “objective” or “Godward” aspect of Cl a 
death may have been, they have generally united in rey 
senting the “subjective” views as conspicuously one-sit 
and defective, and hence the phrases “ moral influe 
theory ” and “substitution by mere sympathy ” have 
been terms of reproach. We can better judge in W 
sense the views in question are “merely subjective,” z 
how far that is a ground of objection to them, after 
viewing the opinions of some of their representatives. 

In Germany a powerful movement of religious thou 
along the lines just indicated was begun by Schleiermac 
(1768-1834). He repudiated the doctrines of expiat 
suffering and of the imputation of Christ’s righteousm 
to us, and held that the redemptive value of Christ lay 
primarily in his death, but in the power and effect of 
consciousness of God into participation in which we 
admitted by faith and in which we find joy and pe 
Christ, indeed, suffered for us in virtue of his uni 
union with us. Implicated as he was in the drama of) 
sinful life, he could not but encounter and endure 
evils consequent upon sin which he had himself in no y 
personally deserved. As the perfect man, the represer 
tive and recapitulation of our humanity, he suffered 
and for us the consequences of our sins and thus in 
by him humanity atoned for its sin. But this work 
Christ was not a propitiation of God, but the me 
whereby the human conscience makes a subjective e 
tion by dying to sin and attaining a new life in Christ 

Among those who developed their thought largel 
the lines of Schleiermacher may be mentioned Carl 

1 According to Schleiermacher ‘‘ Christ’s redemption is the actual 
eration of believers from the sin that prevails in them, by communicatt 
of the power of his consciousness of God, which the individual re 
in the fellowship of those who resemble him.’ ‘‘ Christ having. 
sessed the consciousness of sin as a sympathetic feeling, while yett 
sinless conduct of life he had shut out sin from himself both as a 
and as a state, he takes up believers in the fellowship of his activity a 
of his life on condition that they die to sin.’’ Ritschl, History, pp. 
468. Cf. Der christliche Glaube, §§ 100-105. Characteristic pas 
from Schleiermacher’s exposition of the subject are given, in translati 
in Dr. Fisher’s History of Doctrine, pp. 505-507. 


3” 


MODERN “SUBJECTIVE THEORIES 223 





manuel Nitzsch (1787-1868) and Richard Rothe (1799- 
ik 1867). The former conceives the teaching, the acts, and 
- the death of Christ as a unity, and connects them all with 
_ the founding of the Kingdom of God. Christ unites him- 
self with us in suffering, and thus brings home to us both 
the evil of sin and the grace of God. In his sympathy 
he bears the penalty of the world’s sin. But his work 
is wrought upon and in men; it is a work of enlighten- 
- ment, of inspiration, and of moral recreation.! 
Rothe insisted that no doctrine of Christ’s work was 
adequate which failed to show how it actually removed 
and destroyed sin and restored men to right relations with 
God. Now the problem is this: How can God, in his 
holiness, forgive the sinner until he is actually freed from 
‘his sin, and yet how can he ever be thus freed until he is 
‘first forgiven? In order to salvation, God must forgive 
the sinner in advance —before his sin is overcome and 
' done away. But how is this consistent with the divine 
righteousness? The atonement is the solution. God for- 
“gives sin in advance upon receipt of a guaranty that sin 
‘will be put away. This guaranty is, as it were, furnished 
| to God by mankind in the person of their representative, 
‘the second Adam. God may safely forgive the sins of the 
world in advance, since in Christ he has the assurance 
of the emancipation from sin of all who will enter into 
' fellowship with him. 
_ But how does Christ furnish this assurance? Answer: 
| By perfectly qualify; ing himself to be the Redeemer. 
| _* he has done in his achievement of moral perfection, 
—by his perfect harmony with the will of God and 
| a perfect self-identification with men. Thus he sancti- 
fied himself — devoted himself absolutely to the will of 
if “God and the good of mankind —that men also might in 
the fellowship of his life be sanctified in truth. This self- 
| consecration, born of love, stopped short of no labor or 
‘suffering. It led him down into the depths of men’s ex- 
perience in evil so that he shared in the deepest and truest 
y the consequences of their sin. He bore the sins of men 


1 System der christlichen Lehre, §§ 1382-140. 































































224 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


in his heart. Through the vicariousness of love he shared 
the sinner’s suffering lot. But in submitting to sin he 
triumphed over it. He kept his own life spotless and has 
shown us the path to the same conquest. ‘Thus in Chri 
God forgives by anticipation the sins of the world, since 
in Christ he has the guaranty of sin’s undoing for all who 
will unite their lives to him. In Christ sin is pardoned 
because it is, or is to be, virtually destroyed.} 

Another wide departure from Lutheran orthodoxy was 
made by the Erlangen professor, J. C. K. von Hofmann 
(1810-1877),? who repudiated the view that Christ 
nished a vicarious obedience and so fulfilled the law for 
others; nor would he admit that his endurance of suffe 
ing was penal. Christ’s work was an absolute devotion 
of himself, even unto death, for our salvation. It may be 
called a sacrifice, but only in a metaphorical sense, as the 
act of a mother may be so called when she exposes herself 
to death to save her child. Jesus’ death cannot be sepa 
rated from his life; it was incidental, though inevitable, 
to his saving mission in general which was to reveal an¢ 
make effective in men at once the holiness and the love of 
God. Hofmann makes the life of Christ primary in 
consideration of his saving work, and represents him as 
enduring the consequences of sin only indirectly. Fo 
him reconciliation is virtually one with justification. 

Some of the leading positions of Albrecht Ritseh 
(1822-1889), which bear upon our subject, may be stater 
thus: (1) The wrath of God is only an eschatologica 
conception ; only against persistent and final impenitence 
will God display his wrath; men are not here and now 
the objects of his wrath. (2) The terms “justice” and 
“righteousness,” as used in Scripture, do not denote a 
retributive or judicial quality in God, —his disposition © 
impulse to punish, — but are names for the persistency of 
his purpose of grace. (3) Hence there is no necessity, 

1 Dogmatik, II. §§ 86-55. Rothe’s idea that Christ furnished to Goc 
a warrant or assurance that sin should be conquered and undone, has 
been reproduced by F. A. B. Nitzsch, Dogmatik, pp. 490, 494, 495. 


2 Der Schriftbeweis; also Schutzschriften fiir eine neue Weise alte 
Wahrheit zu lehren, passim. 


' 








———— 





ee 


ee 





MODERN “SUBJECTIVE” THEORIES 225 


even possibility, for a satisfaction of justice, considered as 
a penal element in God’s being, before forgiveness can 
take place, or as a condition of its bestowment; God’s 
satisfaction of justice can mean only the realization of his 
eternal purpose of love. (4) Christ maintained in life 
and in death an unbroken fellowship with God, and it is 
the one great object of his work to introduce men into the 
same consciousness of God’s love and fatherhood, and into 
the same fellowship of life with him which the Son him- 
self enjoyed. (5) This aim is realized through the found- 
ing and upbuilding of the Kingdom of God on earth, 
which is the community of the Godlike, the fellowship 
of those who share Christ’s spirit in the life of conscious 
sonship to God. (6) Christ’s sufferings and death were 
experiences which lay in the path of his duty in revealing 


_ God and in living the perfect life. (7) He procures the 


forgiveness of sins by introducing men into the same rela- 


tion to God which he occupies, that is, by making them 


members of the Christian community. (8) Christ re- 
vealed the guilt and hatefulness of sin by revealing and 
realizing the holy life. His revelation of the guilt of sin 


was the negative aspect of his revelation of holiness. He 


thus sets the evil of sin in the light of perfect goodness, 
and this is its condemnation. 
Ihave made this brief summary, which professes only 


_ to give some of the outstanding points of Ritschl’s theory, 


after a careful study of his discussion,! but in order to 
illustrate it somewhat more adequately I will add a few 
selected sentences of his own. “All the sufferings that 
befell Christ he steadfastly endured, without once proving 
untrue to his vocation, or failing to assert it.” They are, 


_ therefore, “manifestations of his loyalty to his vocation.” 


His violent death, also, “‘was destined under God’s ap- 
pointment to serve the same end.”? Christ is “that 


1 Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Verséhnung, 8 vols. 
Vol. I, containing the history of the doctrine (already repeatedly quoted), 
and Vol. III, containing the constructive development of the doctrine, 
are translated, Edinburgh, 1872 and 1900, respectively. Cf., also, Pro- 
fessor Garvie’s The Ritschlian Theology, Edinburgh, 1899, chs. ix, x. 

2 Justification and Reconciliation, pp. 448, 449. 
































926 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


Being in the world in whose self-end God makes effective 
and manifest, after an original manner, his own eterng 
self-end, whose whole activity, therefore, in discharge of 
his vocation, forms the material of that complete revela- 
tion of God which is present in him, in whom, in sho 
the Word of God is a human person” (p. 451). Ritschl 
declares that the forensic interpretation of Christ’s work 
“conflicts in every respect with the religious interest of 
the Christian.” “The assumption, that in God righteous 
ness and grace work in opposite directions, is in so far 
irreligious that the unity of the divine will forms a 
inviolable condition of all confidence in God.” “It i 
unbiblical to assume that between God’s grace or love and 
his righteousness there is an opposition which, in its bear 
ing upon the sinful race of men, would lead to a contra 
diction, only to be solved through the intervention of 
Christ. . . . God’s righteousness is his self-consistent 
and undeviating action in behalf of the salvation of the 
members of his community ; in essence it is identical with 
his grace” (pp. 473, 474). Ritschl denies that the Old 
Testament sacrifices were conceived as “moving God 
from wrath to grace,” or that ‘the sacrificial offering i 
cluded in itself a penal act, executed not upon the guilty 
person, but upon the victim who takes his place ” (p. 474) 
Christ was, “in the first place, a Priest on his own behalf”; 
that is, “the subject of that true and perfect religion com- 
pared with which no other has been able to bring men to 
the desired goal of nearness to God.” “He is, therefore, 
also the first who was qualified in the true and final man 
ner to exercise that fellowship with God which was the 
aim of every religion, and to experience in himself in its 
fulness the reciprocal and saving influence of God 
(p. 475). The author rejects the penal view of Christ's 
sufferings on the ground that punishment implies guilt; 
and Christ was guiltless. If it be said that his sufferings 
had the quality and worth of punishment, though they 
were not punishment,—that is really to abandon the 
strictly legal interpretation of God’s government of the 
world and to replace the idea of punishment by some 


iE MODERN “SUBJECTIVE” THEORIES DIK 


other conception. ae the attempt of Grotius, for example, 
poena is resolved into afflictio. ‘Christ cannot possibly 
aave regarded as punishment the sufferings which, through 
she fellowship with sinful humanity attaching to his vo- 
sation, he brought on himself as the consequence of man’s 
aostility to good, even although he cherished the com- 
gassionate purpose of contributing by his death toward 
she removal of this guilt” (p. 479). The fact that 
Christ pronounced to the penitent the forgiveness of their 
sins, refutes the idea that his work “in any way made God 
willing to forgive” (p. 537). Ritschl agrees with Hof- 
mann that Christ’s expiation “can have no reference to 
aod.” Thus the proposition that “Christ expiated the 
sin of humanity” can be properly understood only as 
neaning that “he reconciles sinners with God, that is, 
sstablishes peace for them Godwards” (Dp. 569). 

_ There has been in Switzerland and in France a move- 
nent of theological thought similar to that which we have 
‘ust sketched. It was powerfully influenced by Alex- 
wmdre Vinet (1797-1847), who might be called the French 
3chleiermacher. We will briefly illustrate it by reference 
50 two recent thinkers, — Auguste Bouvier (1826-1893), 
Professor of Theology in Geneva, and Auguste Sabatier 
1839-1901), Professor of Theology in Paris. Bouvier 
isserts the necessity that in the work of salvation, sin be 
shown in its true character and condemned as odious in 
iistory ; the human conscience demands this condemna- 
jon. It is also necessary that humanity or humanity’s 
‘epresentative should acknowledge suffering and death 
is Just, and freely submit to them. This is the psycho- 
ogical foundation of the notion of expiation. Further, 
nan, or his representative, must offer himself to God 
without reserve ; the love of man must respond to the 
livine advances. ‘This is the basis of the idea of recon- 
iliation. 

These thoughts are developed as follows: Christ was 
lever more holy and just than in the very moment of his 
assion. In the anguish of his conflict with evil he per- 
ectly fulfilled the moral law and glorified it in the eyes of 











228 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


men. Jesus rendered sin odious, and by this means ¢ 
quered it ; his victory over evil and his entrance inte 
heavenly life attested by the apostles, rendered to © 
moral law an absolute satisfaction and glorified it. Je 
freely consented to his death. He transformed into an; 
of love a brutal reality which seemed imposed upon h 
by necessity. By a voluntary, deliberate, and profount 
intelligent sympathy Jesus entered into the situation 
humanity ; he took men’s place; he was substituted 
them ; he made expiation for them in suffering on th 
behalf. This statement is not to be understood juridiea 
but it is clear to the Christian conscience when we 
sider the inner drama which was enacted in the soul 
Christ. Jesus gave himself up entirely to God, even t 
death, reconciled humanity to God, and so offered to G 
in his person that which God demands of humanity, — 
gift of itself. All this assumes the representative chal 
ter and function of Christ, the reciprocal and consei¢ 
relations between him and men, the solidarity, the 
munion which implies a relation of faith and love betw 
men and himself. 
This saving -work is not an operation completed 7 
some supernatural region, a transaction between the Fat 
and the Son in heaven. It is an anthropological dram 
of which the consciousness of Jesus is the sacred scent 
the plot of which is the relation between man and G 
This drama should be reproduced in the soul of ever 
Christian. The work of Christ is not a passive work ; i 
is not the value of the blood of Jesus, but his active lo 
which is effective. The responsibility of man is 1 
weakened by the death of Christ ; rather does his deat 
awaken the sense of sin which leads man to conversi0r 
The Christian should make expiation with Christ. 
onciliation, redemption, the gift of eternal life —such 
in three words, the work of Jesus. Reconciliation is in 
separable from his person, which is in itself the perfec 
example of the divine life in the human state. Moreove 
Christ has taught humanity to make expiation for si 
that is, to accept the just chastisement of it. He commun 

















MODERN “SUBJECTIVE” THEORIES 229 


cates to those who are united to him by faith the power 
to renounce evil; he has thus delivered them from the 
power of sin. Finally, by his militant holiness and his 
active love, by all the energies of his personality, he 
reéstablishes the divine life in humanity; he gives to all 
his own the eternal life. 
Sabatier believes that God requires no satisfaction but 
sincere repentance. Was not God satisfied with the 
publican’s cry, God be merciful to me, a sinner? Jesus 
did not transact with God to procure the salvation of 
sinners. God did not need to be reconciled to man, but 
man needed to be recovered to God. Pardon can be 
granted only on condition of repentance, and the work of 
Christ is to evoke that penitence in the individual and in 
the race which is necessary to reconciliation with God. 
By his teaching, his deeds, his sufferings, and his death, 
Jesus seeks to touch and win the hearts of men. His 
' death is in no way different, in its purpose and effect, 
from his life; it is the consummation of his work. “It is 
the most powerful appeal to repentance which humanity 
has ever heard, and also the most efficacious, the most 
fruitful in marvellous results. The cross is the expiation 
of sins only because it is the cause of the repentance to 
which remission is promised. The more I have reflected 
| upon it, the more have I arrived at this firm conviction, 
\that there is in the moral world, and before the God of 
‘the gospel, no other expiation but repentance, that is to 
say, this inner drama of the conscience in which man dies 
‘to sin and rises again to the life of righteousness. There 
‘is nothing greater nor better, for repentance is the de- 
' struction of sin and the salvation of the sinner; it is the 
‘ accomplishment in us of the work of God.” Christ’s 
| revelation of the divine love and his willing submission to 
‘suffering in the effort to win us to holiness reveal the 
enormity of sin as nothing else could do. ‘The love of 
the Father appears to us in all its power; the sin of man, 
our sin, appears in allitshorror. Morally, says the apostle, 


1 Auguste Bouvier, Théologien Protestant, par J. E. Roberty, pp. 199- 
| 202. Paris and Geneva, 1901. 


230 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE =~ 


we die with him, and if death is the expiation of our sin 
this expiation is achieved in us at the foot of the cros: 
But what is this mystical death if not a full and perfe 
repentance ?” 1} 
From this excursion into foreign fields we return t 
consider the parallel movement of British and America 
thought. I shall select for brief notice three represen 
tives of each: Frederick Denison Maurice, John Caird, ant 
Benjamin Jowett ; and Horace Bushnell, Elisha Mulfor¢ 
and William Newton Clarke. 
The views of Maurice are developed from the conceptia 
of Christ’s being the archetype or root of humanity, i 
virtue of which he sustains a unique and original relatio 
to the race. He is an eternal second Adam. In th 
incarnation he becomes the Mediator between men ar 
God, bringing them into union with God through fellow 
ship with himself. The basis of the theory is a realisti 
union of Christ with mankind. Now the sufferings ¢ 
death of Christ were not penal, but representative. 
the sinless, archetypal man he bore the sins of the wo 
in the sense that he experienced the pain and shame whie 
only a perfect Being, completely one with man, can fe 
on account of sin. His sacrifice of perfect self-devotic 
evinced both the holiness and the love of God. H 
satisfied God by presenting to him, on behalf of humanit 
the perfect embodiment of his own holiness and love 
His whole life and experience were a perfect realizatic 
of the mind and will of God, and hence a perfect “satis 
faction.” “A perfectly holy and loving Being can k 
satisfied only with a holiness and love corresponding t 
his own; Christ satisfied the Father by presenting 
image of his own holiness and love; in his sacrifice and 
death all that holiness and love came forth completely 
How, then, can we tolerate for an instant the notion of 
God which would represent him as satisfied by the pun 
ishment of sin, not by the purity and graciousness of the 












1 La Doctrine del’ Epiation et son Evolution Historique, pp. 105-10! 
Paris, 1904. An English translation of this book has recently appeare 
(1904). Cf. pp. 127-130. 


| MODERN “SUBJECTIVE” THEORIES allt 


Son?”! In the discussions of Maurice we observe the 
‘struggles of a strong mind in freeing itself from the cur- 
rent orthodoxy, but both the diffuse style and the apolo- 
getic tone of his writings on the subject make it difficult 
to define his views with clearness and precision. The 
general resemblance of his thought, however, to that of 
‘men like Schleiermacher and McLeod Campbell is evident. 

In his Gifford Lectures? Principal John Caird raises the 
‘question “ whether there are any elements of the suffering 
which flows from sin, which a morally pure and sinless 
‘being can experience.” He answers, “ Not only can a good 
‘man suffer for sin, but it may be laid down as a principle 
‘that he will suffer for it in proportion to his goodness.” 
fifence “it was possible for Christ, who knew no sin, to 
er on his soul a burden of humiliation, shame, sorrow, 





for our sins, which in one aspect of it was more profound 
and intense than we could ever feel for ourselves.” ‘ He 
was endowed with a moral susceptibility infinitely more 
‘quick and keen than the best and purest of mankind,” and 
‘therefore “the presence of sin created in him a repug- 
(nance, a moral recoil, a sorrow and shame, which the fallen 
‘and guilty could never feel for themselves” (II. 220-223). 
‘Now such a moral and spiritual suffering with and for 
sinners would constitute an atonement or satisfaction more 
real than any outward infliction ; it would be “a just and 
wighteous expression of the divine condemnation of sin, a 
profound response to that condemnation as just and right- 
eous” (II. 218). But can it be transferred tous? Can 
we make it our own? [If not, it can have no saving value 
for us. ‘To emphasize atonement so as to exclude every 
‘subjective element, would be to make its benefits attain- 
able indiscriminately by the indifferent and the impenitent, 
alike with the soul that is penetrated by the sense of its 
spiritual needs. A salvation that is absolutely complete 
independently of any moral activity in the recipient, 
would be a salvation that superseded any demand for 
ia goodness or holiness of life, and that could be 


1 Theological Essays, p. 125. 
2 The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, Glasgow, 1899. 































232 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


claimed and possessed by those who remained in th 
sins, impenitent and unbelieving” (II. 228, 229). I 
this expiatory moral suffering of Christ is made ours 
faith. Justification by faith “ means that faith is the spir 
ual link that brings us into living union with Christ; 
that not by any arbitrary supposition or legal fiction, I 
actually, in the fundamental principle of our moral li 
we become one with him.” “It is only thus by the con 
ception that the essential principle of the life of Chr 
becomes by faith the essential principle of our own, th 
the doctrine of Christ’s satisfaction for sin and imput 
righteousness can be freed from that character of unreality 
and fiction which has been often ascribed to it” (II. 22¢ 

Professor Jowett devoted a spirited essay to a revi 
of the scriptural data bearing upon our subject and t 
critique of the current popular opinions.’ His princi 
contentions are, that in theology “we are more under t 
influence of rhetoric than in other branches of knowk 
edge”; that the Scriptures employ a great variety 
terms, mainly figurative, to express the saving value 
Christ’s life and death; but that this popular and fit 
language does not properly lend itself to the construe tion 
of fine-spun theories ; that Christ himself does not te 
that his death was to be an atonement or satisfaction 
sin; that the apostolic description of him as a sacrifice 
spiritually meant ; that Christ himself pronounced the f 
giveness of sins without a hint of a satisfaction being nee 
sary; that he “bore our sins” in the same sense 1 
which he “bore our sicknesses” (Mt. viii. 17); that he 
spoke of his death as that of a righteous man who “kk 
down his life for his friends” ; that the historic theo 
are built on “ rhetoric turned into logic,” that is, by mea 
of an unwarranted use of popular and figurative languag 
that they are constructed chiefly out of the ineide 
Jewish elements which survived in early Christianity 
that they issue in a scheme of fictions, such as imputet 
righteousness, and of immoralities, such as the punishmen 
of the innocent, or the setting forth of the Holy One o 


1 Essays and Dissertations, London, 1894, pp. 317-369. 


MODERN “SUBJECTIVE” THEORIES 233 








od as a penal example, and that they are powerless to 
ow how any such apparatus of satisfactions and balances 
really save men, that is, recover them to a holy life. 
“The essay is mainly historical and critical, but the 
' author expresses the opinion that the moral theory which 
“reads the doctrine of atonement in the light of the 
divine love only,” and regards it as the object of Christ’s 
| sufferings and death to “draw men’s hearts to God by the 
| yision of redeeming love,” “seems to do the least violence 
to our moral feelings” (p. 354). Perhaps his clearest 
| positive statement is the following: “ The death of Christ 
| is the fulfilment and consummation of his life, the greatest 
| moral act ever done in this world, the highest manifesta- 
| tion of perfect love, the centre in which the rays of love 
converge and meet, the extremest abnegation or annihila- 
tion of self. It is the death of One who seals with his 
blood the witness of the truth which he came into the 
world to teach, which therefore confirms our faith in him 
| as well as animates our love. It is the death of One who 
E at the last hour, ‘Of them that thou gavest me, I 





; 





have not lost one ’— of One who, having come forth from 
God, and having finished the work which he came into the 
| world to do, returns to God. It is a death in which all 
| the separate gifts of heroes and martyrs are united ina 
divine excellence — of One who most perfectly foresaw all 
things that were coming upon him—who felt all, and 
| shrank not —of One who, in the hour of death, set the 
| example to his followers of praying for his enemies. It is 
| a death which, more even than his life, is singular and 
mysterious, in which nevertheless we all are partakers — 
in which there was the thought and consciousness of man- 
kind to the end of time, which has also the power of 
drawing to itself the thoughts of men to the end of 
time” (pp. 365, 366).1 
_ 1 Professor Moberly thinks that this somewhat polemic essay served a 


good and useful purpose in its time, but intimates that its description 
of orthodox views is hardly less than a caricature of any opinions that 


|| exist, or are at all influential, at present, and that Jowett’s plea for a view 


of Christ’s work which can be ethically justified is scarcely needed to-day 
Atonement and Personality, pp. 386-389). There is some force in both 






























































234 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


The most widely known American representative of tl 
‘moral influence theory ” is Horace Bushnell. Repudia 
ing both the penal and the governmental interpretatic 
of atonement, Dr. Bushnell construeted his theory upo 
the vicariousness of love —the ability and disposition ¢ 
love to enter into the woes of its objects and to share thei 
burdens, “ taking half itself.” He denied that Christ er 
dured the penalty of our sin or suffered as a penal example 
he denied that God was propitiated (in the current accepta 
tion of the term) or needed to be reconciled to us, z 
that Christ’s death opened the way to forgiveness or la 
a basis for it. He held, on the contrary, that the work ¢ 
Christ was throughout an expression of the nature an 
purpose of God, wherein God revealed his holy love— 
his gracious disposition to save men from sin to holiness 
Toward the end of The Vicarious Sacrifice he says: “EB 
the previous exposition Christ is shown to be a Saviow 
not as being a ground of justification, but as being th 
Moral Power of God upon us, so a power of salvatioi 
His work terminates, not in the release of penalties by du 
compensation, but in the transformation of character, ar 
the rescue, in that manner, of guilty men from the re 
tributive causations provoked by their sin. He does ne 
prepare the remission of sins in the sense of a mere lettin, 
go, but he executes the remission by taking away the sir 
and dispensing the justification of life. This one wor 
‘life’ is the condensed import of all that he is, or unde 
takes to be” (p. 449). 

But there is another aspect of Dr. Bushnell’s teaching 
which is commonly overlooked in the popular and polemi 
; references to this theory; I refer to what Paul calle 
the “manifestation of God’s righteousness” in the work ¢ 
Christ. I will illustrate his views on this point by refer 
ence to a few representative expressions made at differer 
periods of his life. In his earliest discussion of atonement 


these contentions, but I think that our review of current opinions hé 
shown that efforts to ‘‘ moralize’’ the doctrine in question still have thei 
place and occasion, and that some of Jowett’s suggestions are still perti- 
nent and timely. 






; MODERN “SUBJECTIVE” THEORIES 235 
in the discourse at Cambridge,! he repeatedly referred to 
the necessity that any work of salvation should preserve 
and maintain the sanctity of violated law. In one single 
paragraph in which he is describing Christ’s mission of re- 
covering man to God and obedience, he employs, among 
the terms by which he describes it, the following phrases: 
“to reéstablish the law as a living power in man’s 
heart”; ‘an expression of his sense of the value of the 
law”; “declares its sacredness”; “a sense of the eternal 
Teactity of the law”; “a more oopeetdace awe of it in 
our conscience”; “ a practical establishment of his law” 
) (pp. 228, 229). 
| In the same discourse he declares: “ It is not Christian- 
| ity, as I view it, to go forth and declare that God is so 
' good, so lenient, such a fatherly Being, that he forgives 
| freely. No; God is better than that—so good, so fatherly, 
_ that he will not only remit sins, but will so maintain the 
sanctity of his law as to make us feel them. The let- 
“go system, the overlooking, accommodating, smoothing 
' method of mere leniency, is a virtual pee dee of all ex- 
| actness, order, and law. The law is made void, nothing 
‘stands firm. God isa willow, bending to the breath of 
|mortals. There is no throne left, no authority, nothing 
' to move the conscience — therefore really no goodness” 
|(@p. 272). Elsewhere in the discourse he says: “It is 
) eyen a fundamental condition, as regards moral effect on 
_our character, that, while courage and hope are given us, 
we should be made, at the same time, to feel the intensest 
| possible sense of the sanctity of the law, and the inflexible 
‘righteousness of God. What we need, in this view, is 
/ some new expression of God which, taken as addressed to 
us, will keep alive the impression in us, that God suffers 
}no laxity. In a word, we must be made to feel, in the 
very article of forgiveness, when it is offered, the essential 
and eternal sanctity of God’s law— his own immovable 
jaeberence to it, as the only basis of order and well-being 
in the universe ” (p. 218). 


| 
i” 
i 


) 
. 


ee a ern 





. oe in July, 1848, and published in 1849 in the volume, God in 


236 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


Many pages in the various writings of Dr. Bushnell 0 
atonement are devoted to maintaining and expoundin 
this view, that in Christ’s sufferings and death is to b 
seen the supreme testimony to the holiness of God and th 
heinousness of sin. Take this example from The Vicarion 
Sacrifice: } “To magnify love, therefore, even the love ¢ 
the cross, as being itself the new creating power of Goe 
would be a very great mistake, if the righteous rule ¢ 
God is not somehow included. When Jesus in his sacri 
fice takes our lot upon his feeling, and goes even to th 
cross for us, we need also to conceive that he does this fo 
the right, and because the everlasting word of righteou 
ness commands him” (p. 171). In the same connectie 
he declares that Christ’s moral power is not the power ¢ 
mere example, nor the revelation of God’s love alone, bu 
that in his suffering and death we behold the operation i 
salvation of all God’s perfections. The Third Part of thi 
book abounds in such titles as these: “ The Law Precey 
duly Sanctified;” ‘Legal Enforcements not Dimi 
ished; ” ‘“ God’s Rectoral Honor effectively Maintained. 
It should be remembered, also, that in the supplementa 
volume, Forgivenessand Law,? designed to supplant Part 
III and IV of The Vicarious Sacrifice as more adequatel 
expressing his view of the Godward aspect of Christ 
work, Dr. Bushnell asserted what he held to be “a rea 
propitiation of God” (p. 12), which “ comprises both th 
reconciliation of men to God, and of God to men 
(p. 83). This propitiation he conceived to consist in God’ 
“making cost to himself” in forgiveness, in the suffering 
which is the necessary correlate and pre-condition of pai 
doning offenders, whereby God “atones himself into f 
gentleness and patience of love” (pp. 48,49). These 
tural descriptions of an appeasement of God from with 
out, the “altar-forms” of biblical thought, Dr. Bushne 
explained in essentially the same way as Calvin did when 
he said, “Such modes of expression are accommodated te 
our capacity, that we may better understand how miserabl 
and calamitous our condition is, out of Christ.” Calvin 


1 Published in 1866, 2 Published in 1874. 8 Institutes, I. 455. 












MODERN “SUBJECTIVE” THEORIES 237 


added that these representations are, nevertheless, “strictly 
true,’ and Bushnell held that they are so, when once their 
pictorial and symbolic character is properly understood. 
Dr. Mulford advocates the view that “ Christ redeemed 
the world by the realization of a perfect life, in the fulfil- 
ment of perfect righteousness, in oneness with humanity, 
and in the conflict with and the conquest of all the forces, 
by which humanity is alienated from God, and men are 
alienated from each other.”! He discards all legal and 
forensic terms and analogies and defines redemption 
entirely as an ethical process. Christ achieved for us the 
perfect life; we are to achieve it in and with him. The 
authors whom he cites with approval as being those to 
whose thought his own is closest akin, are Athanasius, 
Oxenham, Rothe, Maurice, Campbell, and T. T. Munger. 
| According to Dr. W. N. Clarke, the work of Christ 
‘not only shows the love of God for sinners and his con- 
_demnation and hatred of sin, but reveals God as the great 
sin-bearer.2_ He bears the sin of the world on his holy and 
‘compassionate heart. This suffering is redemptive. It 
jsatisfies him better than the penal suffering of sinners 
would do, and it is more certainly saving in its effect upon 
them. Here, then, is a substitute for punishment which 
‘more adequately expresses God than penalties could do. 
“Love suffers in saving, and God bears in order that he 
may save” (p. 346). In his sufferings Christ ‘was 
subjecting himself, in such measure as human life allows, 
ea such treatment as sin offers to God, and was showing 
forth the spirit in which God suffers that he may save’ 
(p. 347). There is a cross in the eternal heart. “God 
ti eternally satisfied with the suffering of love for sin- 
ners, and desires that it may take the place of all other 
/suffering for sin” (p. 348). Here we find the real 
meaning of “propitiation.” ‘ Whatever exhibits God’s 
righteousness, or rightness of character and conduct re- 
Specting sin, has the character of a propitiation ” (p. 348). 
“God alone can set forth his righteousness in a full and 















1 The Republic of God, Boston, 1881, p. 181. 
2 An Outline of Christian Theology, pp. 340, 341, 


238 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 4 










satisfactory exhibition.” ‘God’s own sin-bearing sati 
fies God, and his exhibition of it in Christ completes k 
satisfaction ” (p. 349). 

It will be seen from this brief sketch that Dr. Clark 
occupies essentially the same point of view as Dr. Bushnel 
though he discards governmental language and analogi 
much more completely than Dr. Bushnell did. We d 
not read here, as in The Vicarious Sacrifice, about “le 
before pa emeni ” “legal enforcements” and “God 
rectoral honor.” The terms of the discussion are mot 
exclusively and warmly personal. The subject is coi 
cerned with God’s ethical nature, not with a suppose 
governmental system. » Dr. Bushnell still retained mu 
of the governmental terminology current in his time 
later exponents of substantially the same doctrine hay 
aimed to conceive and interpret the work of Christ 
terms of personal relation, to construe it not as satisfyin 
as it were from without, an official Deity, but as reve 
ing and expressing the righteous and loving Father whe 
Christ declared that he had come to make known and 
bring near to men.! 


1 Other illustrations of this tendency and mode of thought may | 
found in Dr. George A. Gordon’s A New Epoch for Faith, pp. 146-14 
in President Henry C. King’s Reconstruction in Theology, pp. 174, 17 
in Archdeacon Wilson’s Hulsean Lectures for 1898-1999, entitled 
Gospel of Atonement, and in Professor B. P. Bowne’s brochure, 7) 
Atonement. The same general view which has been sketched above 
presented in the sermons of F. W. Robertson, Phillips Brooks, and T. 
Munger. The most elaborate recent presentation of the moral theor 
is contained in the Angus Lectures, entitled The Christian Idea of Ato; 
ment, by Principal T. Vincent Tymms. (Macmillan. London and J 
York, 1904.) 


CHAPTER VI 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 


Tr, now, we leave aside the extinct patristic conception 
of a ransom paid to Satan, we may conclude from the 
foregoing review that five fairly distinct types of theory 
‘concerning the death of Christ have held, and still hold, 
the field in Christian thought : (1) The theory which con- 
ceives God as a private dignitary, offended by sin, to 
whom Christ makes reparation by the payment of his life 
(Anselm). (2) The theory which regards sin, not as an 
‘offence against the dignity of a private party, but as a 
breach of public law, and contemplates God as the admin- 
jistrator of that law, the inexorable magistrate who is 
‘bound to punish every sin with its full desert of penalty. 
(Now, since God has chosen not to punish all sinners, he 
‘must express his wrath in the punishment of a substitute, 
a role which Christ voluntarily assumes. This view 
|Gmingled, to some extent, with the elements of other 
views ) is found in Luther, Calvin, and, especially, Melanch- 
Vee and was carried out to its full logical consequences 
(by the Lutheran and Calvinistic divines of the seventeenth 
a (3) The theory which conceived the govern- 

ent of God as a kind of entity whose interests he must 
protect. In this view sin is, as in the preceding theory, 
ia breach of public law, but God is a Governor, rather 
shan a Judge ; he has not simply to enforce the law, but 
may decide and regulate its application, even relaxing it, 
‘or sufficient reasons. He graciously chooses to withhold 
ts penalties from repentant sinners, but in order to pro- 
ject the dignity of his government and to attest the 
)lameworthiness of sin, he makes a penal example of 

ist. By this means he is able, consistently with the 
sprightness of his moral rule, to pardon sin (Grotius, the 


7 239 




































240 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


Arminian theology and the New School or New Englan 
theology as represented by Edwards and his successors) 
Later theories are less definite and less sharply distir 
guishable, but we may note two general types, and ther 
fore add: (4) an ethicized governmental view which m 
longer conceives God after the analogy of a political rule 
but contemplates him under the categories of fatherhoo 
and holy love and regards the work of Christ as a sa’ 
faction, not to a set of official demands, but to God’s ow 
inner, ethical life. When, now, it is contended that, fro 
this point of view, there can be no satisfaction of God 
eztra, that his satisfaction must be self-satisfaction in loy 
sacrifice, and sin-bearing, the step is taken (5) to the si 
called “subjective” theory, according to which God sz 
isfies himself by revealing and expressing his nature al 
realizing the gracious purpose of his holy love in salys 
tion. It will thus be seen that the time between the 
last two interpretations is quite indefinite. The diffe 
ence is more in the terms used than in any fundament 
principle. Hence I am quite ready to admit that som 
of the writers whom I ranged under (4) might, perhap 
have been as appropriately included under (5), and yi 
versa. 

What judgment, now, shall be passed upon the 
various theories? What estimate, for example, is the 
modern man likely to form of Anselm’s interpretation of 
Christ’s saving work? Dr. Denney’s verdict is th 
“the Our Deus Homo is the truest and greatest book on 
the atonement that has ever been written.”? That whi 
is held to justify this judgment is Anselm’s “ profou 
grasp” of the doctrine “that sin makes a real difference 
to God, and that even in forgiving, God treats th 
difference as real, and cannot do otherwise”; hence “the 
divine necessity for the atonement” in order that G 
may not “do himself an injustice, or be untrue to im 
self.”2 Dr. Moberly has passed quite a different judg 


1 The Atonement and the Modern Mind, p. 116. 
2 Op. cit., p. 117. One can but wonder what the theories of salvation 
are which do not regard sin as making any difference to God, or in W 








A A — SS SS rs gt === == ===" RS ——— 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 241 


ment. He declares that Anselm’s definition of sin1is so 
fatally defective as to vitiate his whole discussion. “ It 


makes sin in its essence quantitative, and, as quantitative, 
external to the self of the sinner, and measurable, as 
if it had a self, in itself.” 2 Hence he thinks there could 
hardly be a better example of a conspicuous failure to 
deal with the real question of salvation than this repara- 
tion-scheme of Anselm ; “ nothing could be more simply 
arithmetical or more essentially unreal.” ® 

But not alone the value, but also the nature, of 
Anselm’s theory, is in dispute. If Dr. Denney had 
found its unparalleled greatness in its parade of syllo- 
gisms and logical puzzles rather than in the truth of its 
underlying ideas, his dictum would have won, I think, 
a more general assent. Anselm’s theory is popularly 
called “the commercial theory” because it so constantly 
uses the terms of quantity, payment, and equivalence. 
Dr. Moberly evidently regards it as the mathematical 
theory par éminence. It appears to me, however, to be, 
far more fundamentally, a feudal theory —an interpre- 
tation based on the ideas of medieval chivalry. Sin is - 
lesa majestas —an offence against the sacred person of 
the sovereign, and for this reason nothing but a great 
reparation can ever satisfy for it. Now the mathematical 
terms which are used to describe the greatness of this 
reparation and its equivalence to the demand are inci- 
dental and illustrative. I grant that there is a constant 
mixture of mathematical and chivalric terms, but I hold 
that the latter express Anselm’s more essential and 
fundamental ideas. Sin is an enormous affront, a shock- 
ing insult to the heavenly Majesty; a single look contrary 
to his command would outweigh the value of the universe, 


respects other theories—the penal and governmental theories, for ex- 
ample — fall short of the greatness and truth of Anselm’s view in this 
matter of magnifying sin. I find it difficult to imagine what the views 
and estimates of the history of this doctrine must be which could give 
rise to the opinion just quoted. 

1 “Sin is nothing else than not to render to God his due”’ (Bk. I. 
ch. ii.) ; that is, it is a robbery of God which necessitates repayment. 

2 Atonement and Personality, p. 370. 3p. 871; cf. p. 218. 


249 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 














including all created souls.‘ Anselm certainly does d 
scribe sin as huge, enormous, something that “ makes 
real difference to God.” But does he describe it as 
is? Does he show the true reasons why it “makes a 
difference to God”? Does he display any marked appr 
ciation of its essential unreasonableness, its real ethic 
character? Does he exhibit it as an offence agi 
inherent right and truth? Does he portray its actu 
nature as selfishness or depict its effects in charact 
and in society? Does he correlate the work of Ch 
in any real way with man’s actual state in sin, and shoy 
or make any effort to show, how his death effects a re 
salvation ? I should answer that in all these respec 
Anselm’s argumentation is as unreal and as irrelevant 
the misleading analogy on which it is based, and as remo 
from the actual business of saving men as the medizy 
scheme of satisfactions, imputations, and merit-treasuri 
of which it is a part. According to this theory, sin 
high treason, not moral corruption; it is not a character 
it remains outside the human conscience ; it is, indeec 
a great fault, but it is hardly a moral fault ; it is stern] 
condemned, but not by holiness in God or conscience 
man. There is in Anselm’s “plan of salvation,” as Di 
Candlish has pointed out,? no essential connection betwee 
Christ and the saved; whether mathematics or chiv 
be the more fundamental to the theory, matters lit 
both are irrelevant. It would be difficult to name ¢ 
prominent treatise on atonement whose conception of sil 
is so essentially unethical and superficial. 

If, as Dr. Moberly justly claims, “the atonement is no 
to be conceived of as an external transaction, from whiel 
God returns, armed, by virtue of it, witha newly acquiret 


1 The idea assumed by Anselm and later asserted by those who hel 
a modified Anselmic view (e.g. Edwards and Shedd), that a finite 
(sin) becomes infinite when it is directed toward an infinite obje 
would seem to require no refutation. It is of a piece with Descartes 
well-known view that our idea of an infinite Being (assumed to be itsel 
infinite) requires an infinite Cause to explain its origin and presence it 
us. These notions are figments of medieval metaphysics. 

2 The Christian Salvation, p. 44. 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 243 






: g ht or faculty of ‘not punishing’ those whom he was 
‘obliged’ to punish before,’!—then I am _ confident 


repose” in Anselm’s interpretation. No theory could 
be more purely “transactional.” No saving value is 
attached to Christ’s life, teaching, or deeds ; in fact, all 
avi ng effect is denied to these, since he owed it to God 
to live a perfect life, and neither he nor we have any 
eredit for that. It is only the supererogatory merit of 
his death that contributes anything toward our salvation, 
and this it does merely as a reparation for an insult to 
offended majesty of Heaven. Moreover, the whole 
sheme is a purely speculative construction. I know of 
© important treatise on our subject which has so few 
points of contact with Scripture. Its whole structure is 
wilt up in practical independence of biblical materials, 
and, naturally enough, is incapable of harmonization 
either with the biblical doctrine of God or of man. 
We have seen that, according to Anselm, the alleged 
: ae that sin be punished, or a heavy fine paid in- 
n , is grounded in the honor or dignity of God. 







the course which God must take is dictated by his pri- 
te feeling and not by considerations of public interest 
DS © principles of universal or necessary validity. Hence 
: a was powerless to show that this necessity was 
bsolute, and he falls back upon fitness or propriety as 
che ground of God’s action. At this point he leaves 
he door open for the entrance of the idea of Duns 
Scotus that Christ’s death satisfies God because he is 
i to accept it. The notion of God as a private 















itary gives rise to a conception of sin and of the 
ecessity of satisfaction widely different (whether for 
tter or for worse) from those underlying Protestant 
tthodoxy. The only reason why the arbitrary God of 
nselm could not forgive without satisfaction was, that 
-would compromise ree dignity. Socinus had but to 
stitute a differently disposed private Deity for 
Im’s in order to show that he might waive the 


1 Op. cit., p. 275. 2 Cf. J.S. Candlish, The Christian Salvation, p. 44. 


244 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 















punishment of man’s offence if he chose. This contenti 
is all the more cogent in proportion as sin is regard 
as being of the nature of a debt. It is vain to deny 
a creditor may, if he wishes, release a debtor from 
payment of a debt.? 

The Reformers deepened and ethicized the concept 
of God which underlies Anselm’s reasoning. For th 
the work of Christ was grounded in the ethical nature 
God, and was required by the supreme and absolute | 
of his being. They picture the atonement, not as a repai 
tion for a private wrong, but as a satisfaction to inviola! 
holiness and a protection to the universal interests 
the moral order. The whole subject was brought ir 
the field of ethics. Anselm’s doctrine was essentié 
non-ethical ; the old Protestant doctrine was ethical, bul 
does not follow that the ethics which was applied to it y 
sound and tenable. We have seen that, as the the 
was carried out, it defined justice as distributive or pu 
tive —the absolute necessity and fixed determination 
punish. Benevolence or mercy was described as a sul 
dinate attribute, optional as to its exercise, and depend 
(in Scotian fashion) on the divine will or dispositi 
But the penal principle was constitutive in the nature 
God and gave the law to his will. Now, if punishme 
is, in any case, to be withheld from the sinner, it must 
inflicted on his substitute. In point of fact, God det 
mined to exempt the elect from punishment, and Chr 
volunteered to take upon himself the penalty of their si 
By this vicarious endurance of penalty justice is satisf 
and forgiveness rendered possible and consistent. 

1 Anselm’s combination of heterogeneous elements gives rise to ot 
questions which we have not space to consider. It has long been reg 
as his great merit that the atonement which he describes was “ob 
tive,” and it certainly is, if by that is meant ‘‘ outside of us”’ and with 
relation to our ethical life. But there is a good deal in his conten 
that sin does not really affect God at all, and that nothing can be re 
conferred on him, to justify Principal Simon’s opinion that Ansel 
‘‘conception of the influence or action of the work of Christ is 
properly objective,’’ but really ‘‘looks toward the cosmos as a who 


since the direct object of redemption is to fill the gap made by the 
of the angels. See The Redemption of Man, pp. 55-58. 


t 


hs 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 245 


The fact that, as our review has shown, this theory is 
obsolescent in the theological thought of to-day is the most 
conclusive evidence that it is intolerable to the modern 
mind and heart. Its case is going by default. Those 
who are strenuous for one or more of its favorite terms, 
such as substitution, are likely to be equally insistent that 
they hold no legal or forensic doctrine. As we have seen, 
the theory has been attenuated and modified out of all 
resemblance to its former shape. 

Some of the difficulties which I find in the theory are 
these: (1) It cannot explain the genesis of redemption. 
If the antithesis which is made between justice and mercy 

exists in God, and if strict punitive justice must always 

e carried out, how can mercy make itself successfully 
heard, or win the day against the requirements of inex- 
orable justice which faeoile the sinner’s punishment ? 
How, on the theory that holiness and justice are inde- 
pendent of love and superior to it, can a plan of grace for 
inners ever arise? If punitive justice les deeper than 
oye in God, and is independent of it, and has its infinite 
ao of wrath excited against sin, how is it logically 

sonceivable that an inferior, optional, and (in its relation 
so “holiness” dependent and non-determining attribute 
dove) should succeed in checking this punitive energy ? 
The theory lays no logical basis in the nature of God for 
i work of salvation. It sacrifices the very motive to sal- 
pation in its effort to show how God surmounted the 

ifficulty of making it possible. But let us waive this 
bjection and suppose that somehow the secondary, de- 
yendent, and optional attribute, love, has induced God to 
ae (some!) men. How can it be done in view of inflexi- 





1The Calvinistic theory permits us to speak of the salvation of men 
mly with this parenthetical qualification. The doctrine to which we 
Mude is succinctly expressed by the Calvinistic revival preacher, George 
itefield, thus : ‘“‘ I frankly acknowledge that I believe the doctrine of 
probation, that God intends to give saving grace, through Jesus Christ, 
ly to a certain number, and that the rest of mankind, after the fall of 
dam, being justly left by God to continue in sin, will at last suffer that 
ternal death which is its proper wages. . . . Our Lord knew for whom 
edied. There was an eternal compact between Fatherand Son. A cer- 











246 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 








ble, punitive justice, which must always be exerci 
everywhere? Answer: It 7s exercised in the subst 
tionary punishment of the sins of the world (or of 
elect) inflicted upon Christ. Here, then, is our see 
difficulty : (2) Can an innocent person be punished ? 
not punishment correlative to guilt or blameworthine 
Is not the principle of distributive justice swum ecuig 
Is it conceivable that God should spend his punit 
wrath upon his eternally holy Son? Can the suffe 
to which a perfectly holy Being voluntarily subs 
properly be called penal? It is not, perhaps, impossi 
on the Grotian conception of “ general,” or “ public,” 
tice, to see how an innocent person may be “ punishec 
but on the principles of the theory in question, the st 
ment seems self-contradictory and absurd. For justice 
this view, is distributive, avenging — the necessary inf 
tion of penalty which flows from God’s wrath against 
How, then, can it flow forth from his wrath except uw 
the objects of his wrath? How can it flame forth u 
an object of his complaisant love? Can God in his wr 
punish the supreme object of his love? It is a contradi 
in adjecto. 

But to return to the initial definitions of the thee 
After they have been laid down, I experience this ¢ 
culty in following the explanation : (8) If punitive jus 
is primary in God and independent of love, and if loy 
secondary and inferior, why does not justice have its’ 
with sinful men? Grant now the answer, “It does h 
its way in the penal inflictions which were visited upo 
Christ.” Waive all difficulties connected with this answe 
and merely ask, “ What led Christ to bear these p 
alties?”’ The only possible answer is, “ Love.” T 
love is, after all, really supreme and triumphant. ( 
averts justice from sinful man only by means of his 
which triumphs over justice, or at least prevails in 


tain number (of souls) was then given to him as the purchase and rewar 
of his obedience and death. For these he prayed, and not for the w 
For these, and these only, he is now interceding, and with their salva 
he will be fully satisfied.’’ 


' 


divine counsels respecting the treatment of sinful men. 

If it be said (and this is what the theory comes to) that 

God avenges himself upon himself in the person of the 

eternal Son, it is still love for man which, supreme and 

eternal in the divine Being, devises and executes this plan 

of sovereign mercy. It is quite certain, then, on the 

theory’s own showing, that if love were really optional as 

to its exercise and if God had chosen not to exercise it, no 

salvation for man would have been possible. But if we 

grant that God might have decided not to save men, the 
question for this theory to answer is: Does not the fact 
“that he does save them prove that love is at least as funda- 
mental and constitutive in his nature as is the appetite for 
punishment? I cannot but regard it as fatal to the post- 
Reformation dogma that it gives no logical ground in the 
being of God for the work of atoning love, imperils the 
divine essence in a war within itself,! and gives no better 
reason why the feebler principle prevails over the stronger 
‘than that God within the realm of his own being expends 
his wrath upon himself, a proceeding to which, if it were 
‘not inherently absurd, he could have been animated only 
by love. 

A further difficulty is this : (4) We have seen that 
the theory is compelled to resort to God’s love in order to 
‘explain the genesis of redemption; Christ is graciously 
‘substituted for us in punishment. Now my question is, 
whether the definitions given by the theory really leave 
‘room for this act of grace.2 We are told that God must 
exercise (punitive) justice always and everywhere. How, 
then, is there any option left him as to the exercise of 
mercy? On the theory under review justice and mercy 
ea opposites. Now if God must punish, how can you say 
that he may forgive, that is, not punish? If retributive 
justice is always exercised everywhere (as Drs. Shedd and 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 247 


























1 Of the conception that it was the office of Christ to reconcile the hos- 
ile attributes of God and to make peace and unity in God himself (see 
. 179), Sabatier says, ‘‘ On appelait cela de la haute metaphysique ; c’ était 
ure mythologie.’’ Hxpiation. p. 100. 

2 On this point see Dr. Robinson’s statement quoted on p. 176. 


948 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 








Strong assert), then mercy cannot be exercised anywhere 
All forgiveness involves a relaxation of the strict law ol 
retribution. 

Another objection to the theory is as follows: (95) 
definition of the divine love and of its relation to th 
divine nature mars the conception of God’s moral ex e 
lence. It is said, for example: “As we may be kind, bu 
must be righteous, so God may be merciful, but must 
holy.”1 This proposition suggests such questions ¢ 
these: Are not men under moral obligation to be kind 
Is the moral obligation to be righteous higher or diffe en 
from the obligation to exercise love? Is God undert 
obligation to be kind or merciful? Would he be as exce 
lent a Being as we believe him to be, if he were not k nd 
or if he were non-kind or unkind? Are not kindnes 
mercy, and benevolence elements of moral perfection, < 
must not God be morally perfect? If, in point of fe 
God were not benevolent and acted solely in naked, re 
utive justice, would he be as excellent a Being as he i 
Think away benevolence from God; would you have le 
the Heavenly Father in whom Jesus taught us to believ 
If so, then love and grace must be activities of me 
caprice, not required by God’s ethical nature, and ther 
fore without moral excellence. If it is optional with 
not to love, then he might (conceivably) be God, that 
the perfect Being, without love; that is, love is not nece 
sary to moral perfection.” 


1 Strong, Philosophy and Religion, p. 196. It seems almost unne 
sary to point out how unscriptural is this author’s definition of holiness 
which makes it synonymous with retributive justice and so places it 
contrast and rivalry to mercy and love. ‘When applied to Jehovah 
says Dr. Davidson, ‘‘the word holiness may express any attribute 
him whereby he manifests himself to be God, or anything about bh 
which is what we should name Divine ; and hence the name ‘ Holy 
‘Holy One’ became the loftiest expression for Jehovah as God, or 
expressed God especially on the side of his majesty.” Theology of | 
Old Testament, p. 253. Between this conception and the definition 
holiness as the unconditional necessity to punish, the gulf is deep a 
wide. a 

2 How radically unscriptural these a priori definitions of the divine 
character are, may be seen by reference to any competent modern exe- 




















SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 249 


But let us take the illustration into human relations, as, 
indeed, we are invited to do: “A man may be kind, but 
must be righteous.”” Suppose a man is not kind, is he the 
sort of man he ought to be? Is he as excellent as he 
would be if he were kind? Is benevolence no essential 
constituent in human perfection ? What would be thought 
of aman who maintained that he was at liberty, at will, 
to love his fellow-men or not? The character of the 
strictly and merely “ just”? Shylock who felt that it was 
optional with him whether he should be kind or merciful, 
and who chose not to be so, has not been generally 
admired. 

A further objection to the theory in question is, (6) that, 
in subordinating love to retributive justice in the na- 
ture of God, it makes a rational doctrine of substitution 
impossible. A substitution which is to have any mean- 
ing or value for salvation must be an ethical affair and can 
spring only from love. Mere retributive justice cannot 
give rise to a substitution, nor can it be satisfied with one. 
It will “have its pound,” and nothing else. The only 
substitution which is compatible with this conception is 
the mechanical and inequitable infliction of so much suf- 
fering on the innocent for so much sin in the guilty. But 
such a substitution, even if possible, is as irrelevant as it 
is immoral. The only vicariousness which has any signifi- 
cance in human life or relations is a quality or activity 
of love. Mere penal righteousness of which love is 


gete. Fuller proof of this will be given later. It may be well, however, 
to summon at this point a single witness. Apropos of our subject 
Dr. Davidson, summarizing the Old Testament doctrine of God, writes: 
“That which is moral includes merey and love and compassion and 
goodness, with all that these lead to, not less than rectitude and justice.’’ 
**God’s love is the highest expression of his ethical being, the synthesis 
and focus of all his moral attributes.’? ‘‘ When Moses asked to see 
Jehovah’s glory, he replied that he would ‘ make all his goodness to pass 
before him’; and he proclaimed his name, ‘The Lord merciful and 
gracious’ (Ex. xxxiv. 6). The glory of God is his goodness, and his 
goodness is his blessedness. He is glorified when by revealing his good- 
ness he attracts men unto himself, and his own goodness is reproduced 
in them, and they are created anew in his image; for to be that is 
blessedness.”” Theology of the Old Testament, pp. 161, 171, 174. 


250 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 




























“independent” can neither accomplish nor permit any 
such substitution. 

For reasons like these I cannot help feeling that there 
is something erroneous in the initial definitions on which 
the dogma of atonement in seventeenth-century Protes- 
tantism rests. When wrought out to its logical issue, it 
seems to me to be contrary to fact in logically excluding 
salvation altogether, contrary to experience in teaching 
that benevolence is no necessary part of goodness, con- 
trary to reason in breaking up the unity of the moral 
nature of God, and contrary to morality in holding that 
God is so “just” that he cannot forgive the guilty, bw 
so unjust that he can punish the innocent. Logically 
carried out, it makes God a strict accountant who is 
indeed, strictly “just,” but is also nothing more. This 
result does not seem to me to coincide with the Christian 
concept of God. 

But, happily, the theory has seldom been logically 
carried out. We have seen that the Reformers only ap- 
proximated its logical consequences. With them the 
theory of atonement was a corollary of the doctrine of 
justification, and while in the exposition of both they freely 
employed the legal terminology of Paul, they did not, any 
more than the apostle, explain the process of salvation 
wholly in forensic terms. Still, it seems to me that they 
never correlated justification and sanctification in any 
vital and adequate way, and that there was a correspond- 
ing hiatus left between their objective satisfaction and 
ethical union with Christ. Atonement, on the one hand, 
and justification, on the other, were rather preliminaries 
to salvation. They were processes which had no clear 
relation to man’s actual recovery to holiness. The righ 
eousness to which they entitled the sinner was an imputed 
righteousness, the merit of another. Neither atonement 
nor justification, in themselves considered, affected the 
character; by them the sinner was merely reckoned as 
righteous. So “objective” were these processes that the 
way was left open to the conclusion that man must be 
allowed to have no contact or connection with them of 


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 251 
ay sort. This idea later Protestantism carried out to 
the point of denying that faith is reckoned for right- 
eousness, lest it should be supposed that man’s act —even 
his act of trust and acceptance —had some part in pro- 
suring his salvation.1 This example only shows to what 
lengths the forensic theology was driven in its well-meant, 
but mistaken, zeal to show that man is saved by an appa- 
es of satisfaction and imputation wholly “outside of” 
him. It involved the seventeenth-century dogmatics in 
she most explicit denial of the Pauline doctrine of the 
mputation of faith.” 
_ It should be understood, then, that in characterizing the 
oenal theory I have had more directly in mind the exag- 
yverations of the Reformed doctrine which were developed 
n the seventeenth century and which, arrogating to them- 
selves the official character of orthodoxy, have ever since 
naintained a wide vogue and influence, but which now at 
ength, like the outworn Jewish system, are becoming ob- 
jolete and antiquated and are on the point of disappearing 
(Heb. viii. 13). It is true that this theory has been in- 
trenched in the old Protestant creeds and has, so far, a 
vertain right to the claim that it is the orthodox Protes- 
ee doctrine. Still, it has been, at no period, entirely 
inchallenged ; it has had its rivals and its critics, until 
Low, at last, there is scarcely a reputable theologian any- 
vhere who ventures to come forward in its defence. As 
ve have seen, those who still speak its language do so with 
requent qualifiers : “as it were,” “so far as,” and “ina 
pee” ; and the stoutest recent defender of substitution 
nd propitiation will not allow that he holds any legal or 
i= theory. 

It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the penal 




















1 Hence we read, for example, in the Westminster Confession (ch. xi.) 
at God justifies men ‘‘not by imputing faith itself . . . as their right- 
usness,’’ etc. When, afterwards, the proof-texts were inserted to sup- 
ort the doctrines propounded, the one which was put in to illustrate 
his assertion was Rom. iv. 5, ‘‘ His faith is counted for righteousness,” 
d, of course, several others which as flatly contradict the assertion 
ade in the article might have been added. 
; #See Rom. iv. 3, 5, 9, 10, 22; Gal. iii.6. Cf. Jas. ii. 23. 


252 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


theory is a provincialism in Christian theology. It appe 
but sporadically in the patristic period ; it has no real sta 
ing in the principles of Anselm or of the medizyal Ch 
its characteristic extravagances were repudiated by G 
tius, by the Arminian theology the world over, and e 
by the new school Calvinism of America. In the Eng! 
Church it has had no considerable foothold in ree 
times. It is derived from Luther and Calvin only 
one-sided interpretation. I cannot find that they e 
detined love in God as secondary and subordinate to 
tributive justice, or taught that his mercy was an attrib 
which was not constitutive in his nature. So far as I. 
ascertain, Ritschl is quite correct in denying that the g 
Reformers ever held these monstrous conceptions. 
—et id omne genus —are, I repeat, provincial ext: 
gances and have no right to the name of orthodoxy in 
comprehensive use of that term. They belong to the 
of Protestant polemic scholasticism which elaborated 
doctrines of a dictated and formally infallible Bible, une 
ditional election, limited atonement, and total deprayi 
and, it is encouraging to observe, are fast passing into 
oblivion which has overtaken their theological kindred 
We have seen that Grotius diverged from Anselm 
his conception of God. According to him God was 7 
an offended party, but the administrator of a moral s 
tem. For him the problem of atonement was, not h 
God should obtain reparation for a personal injury 
robbery which was also an insult —but how he shoul 
safeguard the interests of his government. This was cer 
tainly an advance on the Anselmic view. It defined G 
not in terms of feudal chivalry, but in terms of moral su 
pervision and control; God is conceived in his worl 
wide relations and his action is dictated by consideration 
affecting the well-being of the universe. I think that th 
gravity of sin is not less emphasized by Grotius than 
Anselm, although it is true that he does not so constantl 
describe it in terms of bulk and avoirdupois. For h 
as for Anselm it is sin which compels the Almighty t 
subject his Son to the most bitter tortures in order tha 
















| q SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 253 


his condemnation of it may be asserted and displayed ; 
: only Grotius does not conceive this tragedy as necessi- 
_ tated by the “code of honor,” the necessity of squaring 
accounts with offended dignity, but as necessary to an 
&oerEis THS Suxavocvvns Geod —a tribute to the inviolability 

of the moral order and a deterrent to all future disobedi- 

ence. I cannot comprehend how any one could study 
_ Anselm and Grotius side by side and not feel the incom- 
parable ethical superiority of the latter. 

But, however this may be, both Anselm and Grotius 
are equidistant from the penal satisfaction dogma. In 
_ the one case Christ’s death is a work of supererogation 
—a voluntary act of homage to the offended majesty 
of God; in the other it is an act of deference to the 
exigencies of government, substituted for the punishment 
_ of offenders, which vindicates God’s righteousness as effec- 
_ tively as punishment would have done. In neither case 
is retributive justice conceived as the primary attribute 
and love as a secondary and optional attribute of God; in 
neither case is it held that the necessity to punish is 
| Heaven’s first law. Hence, as has been shown, there is 
in both a touch of the “heresy” of acceptatio. The exclu- 
_-sion of this idea is the primary task of the penal view; 
_ but, as we have seen, it has not proved an easy one. We 
_ have noted this dreaded error lurking on the borders of 
Dr. Crawford’s and Dr. Hodge’s explanations. To show 
_ that God accepted nothing short of full payment; that 
in the “ plan of salvation” he compromised by no jot or 
tittle the requirements of strict retribution; that the 
death of Christ was regarded as the equivalent of the 
_ world’s (or the elect’s) punishment because it was equiva- 
lent; that there could be no forgiveness until the precise 
quantum of penalty due had been weighed out, — this, I 
say, has not been found easy. And even when all con- 
cession, compromise, or relaxation were excluded from 
the doctrine of the cross, they are seen to have crept in 
antecedently as furnishing a motive to Christ’s death — 
an explanation of the possibility of a gracious substitution 
of Christ’s “equivalent punishment” for ours. Thus at 











254 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 



















some point the principle, “ Retributive justice must-b 
and always is exercised everywhere,” breaks down. It 
refutation was never better put than by Augustine 
“ Would the Father have delivered up his Son for us 7 
he had not been already appeased? I see that the Fathe 
loved us before the Son died for us.”? The fact of salva 
tion rests on the primacy of love in God. . 
It may be well to summarize the defects of the theo 
of Grotius. They are, in my judgment: (1) An unwar. 
ranted use of political analogies in his doctrine of Go 
and of his government. His Deity wears an official 
magisterial cast and his acts and motives are too much 
conceived on the analogy of human political organizations, 
The “moral government” of God is conceived as a kin¢ 
of objective reality with which God himself stands i 
relation and for whose exigencies he must provide. (2) 4 
too statutory conception of the divine law. (3) An in 
definite and unclear view of the relation of justice to th 
divine will and nature and a deficient consideration of the 
relations of justice and benevolence. (4) The hazines 
of the idea of a “penal example.” Is the conception 
an official suffering in our stead in order to honor God’ 
government much easier or more acceptable than an off 
cial punishment in our stead? And what, in any case, i 
the meaning of satisfying God’s government by official 
suffering as an example? The proceeding seems arbi 
trary and ineffective in any meaning which I ean attach te 
such terms. It has commonly been felt, I think, by those 
who, in general, have followed in the wake of Grotiu 
that he had failed to grasp the deeper ethical question 
involved; hence the efforts of his successors to show hoy 
the work of Christ satisfied, not the “moral government 
of God, but God himself, by both revealing his grace and 
vindicating his righteousness. But this, at least, may be 
said for the theory of Grotius: it was capable of adjust 
ment, by modification, to the requirements of moderr 
thought and of harmonization with the Christian ideas o! 
God and of his relations to the world, and this is moré 


1 On the Trinity, Bk. XIII. ch. xi. 













SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 255 
aan can be truthfully said of Anselm’s theory or of the 
al satisfaction dogma. 
the ethical satisfaction theories are praiseworthy at- 
ots so to revise the doctrine of propitiation in its legal 
s and so to connect the whole work of Christ with 
actual life of man as to show that his sufferings and 
th were not merely a condition precedent, but an actual 
yer of salvation. Those who have wrought out these 
ories have felt that there was a truth underlying the 
ial view which must be conserved and magnified, 
nely, that Christ’s work, and specifically his death, was 
: way a solemn, supreme testimony to the guilt of 





















—that in his sufferings we are to behold revealed both 
BP dnces and the severity of God. These writers 
ve, indeed, broken with the penal theory. They em- 
tically deny that Christ was punished, that our guilt 
simputed to him, that we are saved by an imputation 
‘his merit, and that any equivalence is to be predicated 
ween his sufferings and man’s punishment. They 
ny that God was appeased, induced, or made willing, 
Christ’s sufferings, to forgive sin. They hold that 

is primary in God, but that the divine love is no 
ere good nature. It includes righteousness, as well as 
nevolence, and both must be expressed and satisfied in 
e work of salvation. They deny that justice must first 
> satisfied in order that mercy may operate, but hold 
at both must be revealed together, since both are 
ually constitutive elements in the nature of God. 
e writers repudiate the narrow definition of justice 
paid pro quo retribution, and hence deny that God must 
punish sin before he can forgive it. They conceive 
e as that quality in God which compels him to dis- 
ove and condemn sin — the self-preservative element 
is nature — the self-respect of perfect love. They 
, however, that punitive, retributive justice must be 
reised always and everywhere; in that case no salva- 
were possible at all. 

se writers retain more or less of the terminology of 
orical theories ; for example, propitiation, recon- 


256 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 


ciliation, and satisfaction. But, in general, these te 
receive a modified meaning. The interpretations 
and, in many cases, are not very clear and definite. 
quently the reconciliation of God to us is stated to cor 
in the fact that the atonement has an “ objective aspet 
or a “ Godward bearing,” or that Christ submitted to s¢ 
requirement of the divine order, thereby attesting 
displeasure at sin, and so satisfying him. In other case 
is held that God is satisfied by self-expression, and li 
or no effort is made to show how he could, in any se 
be acted upon by a mediator or a representative of n 
kind. In such cases, of course, the “ subjective ” theo: 
are approximated. In most of these mediating elf 
there is seen a strong determination to hold fast to 
juristic texts, though it may be questioned whether t 
are always taken in their full force. There is evide 
an instinctive feeling that it is more seemly to cling | 
questionable interpretation of Paul than to appear to | 
company with him at any point. One must be Pav 
enough to continue the use of his legal terminology, ey 
it is filled with new content and put to new uses. 8 
writers of this class—and this is quite as true of 
modified penal theorists — remind one of the citizen 
is in favor of the law, but against its enforcement ; 
are in favor even of Paul’s inheritance from late Juda 
but are not strenuous in its application. 

The theories in question are often careful to insist 
they, in contrast to “ moral influence” views, are “ol 
tive.” I shall give some reasons for thinking that t 
is, in this connection, a good deal of word-jugglery 1 
these terms “objective” and “subjective.” I shall attem 
to show, if I may express myself so paradoxically, t 
there are no “subjective” theories of salvation, and 
the theories which seek the cover of the word “o 
tive” are not objective. Of course my meaning is 
each type of theory has, in fact, both a subjective a nt 
objective aspect ; in short, that, in this respect, thet 
no generic distinction between them. One is temp e 
say that these terms are controversial weapons — Wor 




















SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS AST 


lo conjure with, like so many labels of indefinite import 
ut ominous suggestion in theology. Their use reminds 
me of the current methods of refuting certain forms of 
philosophic thought by characterizing them as “ mere sub- 
ective idealism.” I have been interested to hear Pro- 
essor Paulsen say what I had long suspected, that there 
ever was any such thing: “ No normal mind, and perhaps 
10 abnormal one either, ever, even for a moment, doubted 
she existence of a world independent of his own ideas.” ! 
Merely “ subjective ” theories of the work of Christ really 
»xist where “ solipsism ” does, in the subjectivity of their 
pponents and critics. That is the only proper sense in 
|which they are “ subjective.” 

I observe that Dr. Moberly has adverted to this same 
point. He says: “In truth the very antithesis (of sub- 
ective and objective) is, on examination, artificial and 
anreal. For here, as elsewhere, the words ‘ subjective’ and 
objective’ are only relatively, not really opposed. So far 
s either of them from really denying, that each in fact 
implies and presupposes the other ; nor can either of the 
= in complete isolation from the other, be itself ulti- 
ately real. . . . Thus those who plead for an objective 
tonement are right— but would not be right, if its ob- 
ective reality could be irrespective of realization subjec- 
ively.”2 As to Dr. Moberly’s own theory, he claims, 
of course, that it recognizes the objective or Godward 
reference of the work of Christ, but he says that he is 
sking people “to believe in the work of Christ’s passion 
as a real transformation of themselves, as finding its 
limax in the real climax of themselves. So far it may 
truly be said that we are demurring to a purely objective 
heory of atonement. Atonement cannot be described, 
r accounted for, simply as a transaction, external to the 
elves who are atoned for. In themselves is its ultimate 
ignificance. In themselves is its ultimate reality. Nor 
can they themselves be ultimately realized any other wise 
save through it” (p. 319). But how perfectly obvious 


















1 Introduction to Philosophy, p. 352. 
2 Atonement and Personality, pp. 140, 141. 


258 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE 

















it is that this is a conception which the representati 
of the old theology would stigmatize as a “ purely sub: 
tive,” “mere moral influence theory,” utterly lacking 
the truth and value of a satisfaction wrought wh 
“outside of us.” 
The terms “subjective” and “objective,” as used 
application to our subject, are in sore need of definiti 
Let us note one or two further illustrations of this ne 
In his excellent discussion of atonement, Professor H. 
Sheldon refers to Dr. Bushnell’s theory (as presentec 
The Vicarious Sacrifice) as a “subjective theory,” anc 
contrast claims for his own a “ Godward bearing,” an ob 
tive element. This element Bushnell “ repudiates.” 
see. What is the objective element in Dr. Sheldon’s vie 
It is the revelation, in Christ’s work, of God’s « S 
consistent disposition,” of the perfect harmony of 
attributes; it is the maintenance of “the balance or ¢ 
ditioning interrelation of the divine perfections”; iti 
once “a manifestation of immeasurable love, and as 
tion to moral order or a testimony to the supreme va 
and necessity of righteousness.” This “latter element 
the specifically “objective element.” It is the “backgror 
of holiness ” on which is set the manifestation of loye 
that God is revealed and operative in the work of Ch: 
in “the totality of his ethical nature, or in entire ¢ 
sistency with himself.” “The above,” says Dr. Shel 
“amounts to a definition of the objective element of { 
atonement.” ! These seem to me to be very admi 
statements; but does Dr. Sheldon mean to say 
Bushnell “ repudiated” the objective element of Ch 
work as he himself has defined it? I have read him t ) 
purpose if such is the gase. The passages already cil 
(p. 235 sq.) from God in Christ and The Vicarious Saeri 
show how firmly he held (to quote again his own wor 
that it is a very “great mistake” so to “magnify e 
the love of the cross” as not to include “the righte 
rule of God.”? It is true that Dr. Bushnell denied #l 


1 System of Christian Doctrine, pp. 402-404. 
2 Vicarious Sacrifice, p. 171. 


7 g 
“ 
; 


: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 259 





Christ’s work was “Godward” in the sense of “giving 
God an incentive to be gracious”; but these are the 
_yery words in which Dr. Sheldon expresses his agreement 
at that point with Dr. Bushnell. Over and over again in 
each of his writings on the subject Dr. Bushnell affirmed 
as much as Dr. Sheldon asserts when he says, “ There 
is an objective element in the atonement, namely, that 
feature of Christ’s work which meets the demand that 
the claims of divine holiness or righteousness should be 
-signally expressed along with the supreme manifestation 
of God’s love.” 1 But, of course, the old theories meant 
much more than this in asserting the objective bearing 
of Christ’s death. In the forum of historic orthodoxy 
Dr. Sheldon’s views would fall under the same condem- 
nation as Dr. Bushnell’s as “ purely subjective theories.” 
In the interest of clearness “ subjective ” and “ objective,” 
as applied in discussions of atonement, should either be 
defined or disused. 

Another illustration, which I must forbear to present 
in detail, is found in Dr. David Somerville’s exposition, 
in which the “objective element” is said to consist in 
'Christ’s “rendering to God in our name that obedience 
to his will which we had no power in ourselves to ren- 
der;” as “furnishing, by what he did, the conditions that 
had, in the nature of things, to be present before the 
jeternal love of God could be seen to be what it is, or 
could be believed in aright by us.” But we must beware 
‘of the “error of regarding him as a vindictive God whose 
‘wrath has to be appeased before he can look with favor 
on the human race.”? But the idea of a “ vindictive 
God ” who requires to be propitiated, appeased, and so 
‘Teconciled to us, Sete precisely the historical mean- 
jing of the “ objective ” or “ Godward ” bearing of Christ’s 
sufferings and death. Moreover, Dr. Soaee tile seems to 
me to betray the feeling that the objective element which 
he admits scarcely measures up to Paul’s idea of recon- 
ciliation on its divine side. 














1 System, pp. 410, 411. 
2 St. Paul’s Conception of Christ, pp. 90-93. 


‘by Professor Bowne: ‘*God has revealed himself in his Son as 0 









260 THE PRINCIPAL FORMS OF THE DOCTRINE : 


If “objective” were used to express the notion tha 
the work of Christ changed the disposition or feeling ¢ 
attitude of God toward men, and so reconciled him to u 
that would be clear; but when it is so weakened ; 
to stand for the idea that in Christ God expresse 
his righteousness as well as his benevolence, or whet 
as often, it assumes the thought-concealing function 
telling us that it designates one aspect of a “new rel 
tion” of God to the world, then we must say of it that 
expresses, in the one case, what all theories maintain, an 
that, in the other, it is too vague and meaningless © 
serve any useful purpose.! 

Now, whatever be one’s personal opinions on the ge 
eral subject which we have been reviewing, one conel 
sion is absolutely evident: the theories which 
kindred to the thoughts of such men as Anselm, M 
lanchthon, Turretin, and even Grotius — the interpret 
tions of the work of Christ in mathematical, legal, an 
official analogies —are obsolescent.. One may deem 


1 It is common, in controversy, to describe all efforts to interpret t 
work of Christ in terms of ethical or personal relations as ‘‘ moral inf 
ence theories ’’ whose principle is represented as being that God mak 
a display of his love in order:to induce men to repent. This represent 
tion is of a piece with that which describes moral views as ‘‘pu 
subjective ’’ or as advocating redemption by ‘‘mere example.” 
counterpart of this contention would be that many human parents h 
that the best way to secure obedience in their children is to make 
exhibit, from time to time, of their love to them and, upon occasion 
pose before them as moral models. But even this controversial ca 
ture of the moral view will compare favorably with the theories of equiy- 
alent payment, penal example, and vicarious punishment. What t 
moral view really is may be learned from the following description of 


Father, as bearing us upon his heart, and as supremely desirous of si 
ing us from the sinful life which must end in death if persisted in, ai 
recovering us to righteousness and the filial spirit. For this the Divine 
Son has given himself; for this the Holy Spirit came and comes; @ 

the work of both the Son and the Spirit roots in the Father’s love. 
in all this the aim is not to satisfy the demands of justice, nor yet to sa 
men from penalty, but to save men from sinning, to lift them Godwa 

and to bring them to that spiritual attitude which will make it possil 
for God to bestow himself upon them in infinite and eternal blessin 
It is not a problem in forensic technicalities, but in spiritual dynamic 
The Atonement, pp. 116, 117. 


i SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 261 


-ealamity, but he cannot deny that it is a fact. These 
heories are, doubtless, strongly intrenched in popular 
hought and are eagerly cherished by old school theo- 
ogians ; but, with slight qualifications, it may be said 
hat they have no defenders. They are more or less 
hampioned in periodicals which are designed and- 
dapted to promote the unquestioning popular acceptance 
f dogmatic tradition ; but in the literature of investi- 
ation, in the theological monographs and doctrinal 
ystems which are attracting attention and exercising 
yidespread influence to-day, these theories find, practi- 
ally, no place. Some of the most conservative scholars 
re awakening to the fact that, without important quali- 
cation, the theories which have prevailed in the past 
annot hope for acceptance from the modern mind, and 
ave even made cautious suggestions —not infrequently 
vailing themselves of a truly diplomatic indefiniteness — 
oe their adaptation. The task of accomplishing 
ais adjustment is great, and who is sufficient for it? It 
aust be the age-long labor of many minds; but one 
hing seems clear: it will require a careful reconsidera- 
on of those “ previous questions” with which the doc- 
rine of salvation is so vitally connected; namely: How 
@ we to conceive the ethical nature of God? What were 
eé aim and method of our Lord’s mission ? and, What is 
e relation in which he stands to our human history and 
pstiny ? 







PART If 










CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRI 


CHAPTER 
THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD 


WE have already had frequent occasion to observe | 
largely men’s conception of the nature and condition 
salvation is determined by their view of the moral ¢ 
acter of God. The more primitive peoples, who 
conceived of their gods as fickle and revengeful, } 
imagined that they could placate them or purchase # 
favor by costly sacrificial gifts. Similar conceptions 1 
have been more or less associated even with Jey 
offerings. In early Christianity, when a crude dual 
prevailed, salvation could be regarded as achieved 
man by a ruse or plot by which the Almighty outwi 
the devil. For Anselm the problem was how to 
a sufficient homage to God’s dignity which had } 
offended by sin; for Grotius, how adequately to s 
guard the interests of his moral government. The 
vocates of penal satisfaction believed in a God who m 
punish sin ; on what terms, then, could he forgive it, 
their question. The Scotists and Socinians held ¢ 
God could save men on such conditions as pleased 
why, then, had he chosen so tragic a method? By 
theory of atonement has, explicitly or implicitly, its ¢ 
particular theory of the ethical nature of God. 

This fact is a sufficient reason for our placing ir 
forefront of our constructive discussion the questi: 
What is the Christian conception of the ethical natur 
God? But we cannot even raise this question with 
raising others along with it, for example: Is there 

262 


THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD 263 


such thing as a specifically Christian concept of God? 
and, Where is it to be sought and obtained? Do not 
the variations of view among Christian thinkers respecting 
the nature and policy of God show that the whole sub- 
ject is in hopeless confusion? It may be granted that it 
would be very difficult, if not impossible, to deduce from 
the differing theories which we have reviewed a definite 
and consistent notion of God; it is not quite easy to 
believe that all the great theorizers are trying to describe 
the same Being. 
_ But one thing is clear, if there is no specifically Chris- 
tian concept of God which can be ascertained and fairly 
‘a defined, then our task is utterly vain. The revolt of 
our time against the older theories of atonement is the 
result of the conviction that they were not developed from 
she Christian conception, or, at any rate, were only derived 
from it by a one-sided and exaggerated application of some 
of its elements. This is, at bottom, the one indictment 
which our age brings against the earlier forms of specula- 
don; they are not adequately Christian. There is no 
1ope for the efforts of present-day thinkers and students 
they cannot improve upon the work of earlier times in 
brecisely this respect. I venture to say that no moderns 
we likely to come forward who can argue more acutely 
han Anselm and Grotius and Turretin. We shall im- 
rove on their views only in case we start with truer pre- 
juppositions, — only in case we build on a truer conception 
of God. 
| By the Christian conception of God I understand, pri- 
arily, Christ’s own conception. Now, not one of the 
istoric theories ever stopped to inquire what this was, or 
ade any effort to correlate its doctrine of salvation in 
ny direct or specific way with Christ’s own consciousness 
nd concept of God. But this is the primary requirement 
or a Christian doctrine of salvation. We may fail in 
yur effort to accomplish this task, but if we do not make 
e effort, we have failed already. 
We find, of course, in the teaching of Jesus no abstract 
|tatement or ready-made definition of the nature of God, 






































264 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN! 


such as theologians undertake. Jesus did not discuss 
“attributes” of God, but he did what is far more illum 
nating: he revealed and interpreted God to men; 
described in terms that men could understand how G 
feels and acts; he bade men see God in his own life z 
person. If there is any other source for the Christi 
knowledge of God comparable with this disclosure 
him, then the great central conviction of Jesus was 
illusion. He dared to say that no man knew the Fath 
except him to whom the Son revealed him. He certair 
claimed to have made a clearer and more adequate d 
closure of God’s nature, will, and relations to manki 
than had been made before or elsewhere. This he claim 
to do in his teaching, his life, and his character. No 
should say that in Jesus’ revelation of God two poil 
stand out in clear relief: (1) that for him the te 
“Father” best expressed God’s nature and relation 
men, and (2) that he made the quality of mercy or gra 
primary in the character and action of God. 

What did Jesus mean by the fatherhood of God? 
must find the answer in the connections of though’ 
which he has set the idea. He required men to be co 
plete, not narrow and grudging, in love, in order 
they might be like their Father (Mt. v. 48); they m 
love all men, even their enemies, if they would be 1 
sons of their Father, that is, be morally kindred to h 
(Mt. v. 45). He grounds the requirement of equity a 
fraternity in the fatherhood of God (Mt. xxiii. 9). J 
must forgive, that their Father may forgive th 
(Mk. xi. 25). The Father is generous and bountiful é 
to the evil and unthankful, sending his rain upon 
(Mt. v.45). The attitude and action of the earthly fat 
in the parable of the Lost Son are intended to dese: 
God’s feeling toward the sinful sons of men. These are 
examples. The term “ Father” as applied to God carries 
with it all the meaning which the human analogy 
adapted to suggest. It is an idealization of the love, care 
and solicitude which constitute the very soul and mean 
ing of human parenthood. If human parents are will 


THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD 265 





and eager to give good gifts to their children, the Father 
in heaven is yet more willing to give the blessings of his 
grace to all who desire them (Mt. vii. 11). Fatherhood is 

hus seen to be a synonym of love. This usage is what 
the Old Testament would lead us to expect. There God 
is Father to Israel, his beloved son, the chosen object of 

is care and favor. In his fatherly love he called his son, 
Israel, out of Egypt (Hos. xi. 1). It is the part of pater- 
al compassion that he has mercy upon Ephraim, for whom, 
s his dear son, his heart is stirred with tender feeling 
Jer. xxxi. 20). Sympathy, pity, brooding care and love 
these are the characteristics of fatherhood in the Old 
estament and in the teaching of Jesus. The principal 
ifference is that in the Old Testament the fatherly rela- 
jon of God is chiefly limited to Israel, while in the 
eaching of Jesus it is universalized. 

The second point is that Jesus magnified the grace of 
God, placing it in the very forefront of his teaching. He 
grounded his own mission in that mercy. It was the pity- 
ng love of God which sent him into the world. The 
: 








llest apology for his life work as the Seeker and Saviour 
pf the lost is found in that series of parables in which he 
jleseribes the shepherd searching for the lost sheep, the 
yoman sweeping the house for the one lost coin, the 
ather waiting and watching for the wandering son’s 
eturn. The compassionate love of God who does not 
esire that any should perish,—that is the reason why 
esus is in our world. He came to seek and to save 
hat which was lost. And yet, there is a theology which 
ells us that merey is a secondary attribute of God, that 
punitive justice? is his primary characteristic, and that 
here is no forgiveness with him until he has first pun- 
hed. This view may derive some support from late 








1 Perhaps it may be well to explain that for convenience I use the 
/erms ‘‘punitive’’ and ‘‘penal’’ righteousness in the sense of avenging 
compensatory justice. It would require the constant employment of 
locution to avoid this long-established use of the words in question. 
do not mean, however, by such an accommodation to give my assent to 
e theory of punishment which underlies this use of the words (cf. Part 
IL. ch. iv.). 


2966 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINI 












Jewish speculation and from the heathen classics, bu 
is the virtual negation of Christ’s message. 

But has Jesus nothing to say of the law and pen 
side of God’s nature? Does he, too, fall under the char 
of sickly sentimentalism which theology has been pror 
to prefer against the doctrine of the primacy of k 
in God? Is he then “mere benevolence,” “easy ge 
nature”? Are there no “terrors of the law”? Is there 
wrath in God? It must be admitted that the teach 
of Jesus falls short of the customary requirements 
ovthodox theology in this respect. He seldom spoke 
the wrath, or even of the righteousness, of God.! He‘ 
not dwell, prominently, upon the law and penalty side 
his being. He spoke of the law, but said that love 
the ethical substance of it. He represented God as 
cious, predisposed to forgive, willing in advance to best 
his good gifts. He never spoke of any wrath that_ 
to be first expended or of any retaliatory justice wh 
created an obstacle to the operation of his grace. 
never hinted that God must be satisfied by sacrifice 
propitiated by suffering before he was at liberty to forg 
sins. On the contrary, he proclaimed a ready and ¥ 
ing forgiveness; nay, over and over again, he declared 
fact oF forgiveness ; “thy faith hath saved thee, ga 
peace.” It is not strange that theology has found 
teaching deficient. Its premisses are not here. This 
indeed, stated or acknowledged only in cautious | 
roundabout ways. Some tell us that we could not exp 
an adequate doctrine of salvation from Jesus; it wo 
have been premature; for that we must look to k 

11 do not forget that the phrase dixaroctvn abrod (i.e. eod) occul 
Mt. vi. 33, but the phrase does not there designate an attribute of 
to say nothing of ‘retributive righteousness.’? The word dpy7% (se. 
is once put into the mouth of Jesus (Lk. xxi. 23. The word is not f 
in the parallel accounts, Mk. xiii., Mt. xxiv.). It is synonymous with 
woes and tribulations which are to befall the Jewish people at the 
struction of their sacred city. It is the day of God’s vengeance upor 
nation for its sins. The ‘‘ wrath’? expresses itself in temporal calam 
its effect is seen in one of the great judgments of history. This pai 


constitutes an apparent, rather than a real, exception to the state! 
made in the text. But, in any case, this is the formal exception, 


THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD 267 





thought where the premisses needed for our theological 
heories may be found. Some make bold to declare that 
Jesus did not, in any case, come to preach.the gospel; 1! 
nd, of course, we are not to seek to learn the “ plan of sal- 
vation” from him. In these ways theology betrays its 
consciousness of how little it has in common, at this 
point, with the teaching of Jesus himself. In this it is 
certainly quite correct. 
_ But is the God whom Jesus knows and reveals mere 
indulgent good nature, who does not “deal seriously” 
with sin? It is frequently suggested in books of theology 
hat we are in imminent danger from this alarming error. 
F flood of sentimentalism, we are told, is sweeping us 
rom our moorings to inviolable law and retributive 
cighteousness ; thvonies of salvation are abroad which 
ake no serious view of sin. I have not observed the 
evidence of this peril. I have never read any Christian 
eo on the work of Christ who himself makes light 
3 sin, or who thinks that Jesus lightly estimated it, or 
who doubts that God is inviolabiy holy and must forever 
repudiate and condemn all moral evil. I am strongly 
nelined to believe that the real cause of these frequent 
i of alarm is the collapse of theories which men are 
i- in desperation to support. They mistake the 
Jownfall of the platform on which they are standing for 
‘the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds.” But 
sheir alarms are misplaced ; the foundation of God stand- 
ie sure.? 


1See p. 194. The writers of the Gospels, however, state the contrary. 
ark sets in the forefront of Jesus’ ministry his coming into Galilee 
“preaching the gospel of God,’’ in which he bade men believe (i. 14, 15), 
ind Luke relates that Jesus solemnly announced that to ‘preach the 
ospel to the poor’’ was a part of the work for which he was anointed 
ly. 18). According to the same evangelist he was ‘‘ preaching the gos- 
el”? in the temple (xx. 1) when the priests and scribes challenged his 
thority. 

2“ We avoid saying that Christ purchased pardon for us by enduring 
unishment, not because we think lightly of human sin, —not because 
e think proudly of our own merits, —not because we have low views of 
hrist. These are irrelevant slanders, with which theologians, baffled 
D argument, try to make good an untenable position, We avoid saying 


268 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


Does any one ask for sayings of Jesus in which the he 
ness of God and his stern disapproval of sin are depicte 
What if there are none? We have seen that Jesus d 
not use the terms “ justice” or “wrath” of God; that 1 
did not speak of God at all after the manner of our di 
cussions of his “attributes.” But it does not follow 
what we call the eternal righteousness of God, his moral 
perfection which must be hostile to all sin, has no pla 
in Jesus’ conception. If he had never applied the wor 
“holy ”! to God or spoken of his judgment upon sin,? I 
revelation of the divine righteousness would not have be 
less clear and emphatic. The revelation of God throu 
Christ is primarily in Christ’s own life and charae 
“He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father.” Wh 
was Jesus’ attitude toward sin? That is the disclost 
of God’s estimate of it. 

It should not be necessary to produce the eviden 
that Jesus took a most serious view of sin. But 
exhibited its nature and ill desert chiefly by contras 
it with goodness. He did not keep saying to men, Yi 
are miserable sinners, repent and flee from the wrath | 
come. That was the message of John the Baptist, a 
a true and necessary message it was; but that of Jes 
was something more and better. He said rather, Yi 
are meant to be, and may be, true sons of God; and | 
showed men what the life of sonship to God is. His w 
a positive message and a positive work. He revealed 
men their sins by showing them the possible noble a 
holy life which opened before them, and bade them ente 












that Christ purchased pardon from God’s law, because we cannot f 
in that belief any meaning which is compatible with worthy thoughts 
man or of God, of guilt or of salvation.’’ R. Mackintosh, Hssays lowe 
a New Theology, p. 59. Professor B. B. Warfield has renewed the cha 
alluded to above in an article in the Princeton Review for January, 1908, 
in which he attributes defective views of sin to those who maintain W 
he calls ‘* benevolencism,’’ or the doctrine of the ‘‘ indiscriminate love 
God.’? In reviewing this article in the Theol. Jahresbericht for 1904, 
p. 1145, Titius very justly remarks: ‘‘ Schiirfste Zuriickweisung verdient 
die Behauptung, dass die neueren subjectiven Theorien aus mangelnd 
Siindengeftihl hervorgehen.”’ 

1 Jn, xvii. 11; cf. v. 26. 2 Mt. v. 21; xi. 22; xii. 36, ete, 


t 


Hence his was no mere repentance-baptism, but a bap- 
tism with the cleansing, life-giving Spirit of God. For 
him sin had all its hatefulness and horror, not as a kind 
of entity in itself, that is to say, as an abstraction, but 
as a contrast to goodness, a lapse and a failure to realize 
the real meaning and ends of life. It was his sense of 
man’s infinite worth which supplied the measure by 
which he estimated whatever debased and ruined man. 
Hence no other ever saw and portrayed the exceeding 
sinfulness of sin as Jesus did. His pure eye saw deep 
down into the inmost nature of sin as a perversion of 
the moral life, a wrong choice and preference, a corruption 
of the will and of the affections, a threatened atrophy 
and loss of the soul. On the white background of his 
own conscious holiness, in the perfect light of the divine 
perfection, he saw and felt, as no other ever did, the 
black enormity of sin. 
This realization of the evil and hatefulness of sin was 
ased in Jesus’ high and strenuous sense and knowledge 
of the divine holiness. This will be admitted and, indeed, 
egarded as axiomatic by all who have any appreciation 
of the life and work of Jesus. A certain class of theo- 
ec writers, as I have intimated, seem disposed to 
make capital for their own theories of atonement by insin- 
a that those who hold other theories doubt or deny 
hat Jesus regarded and treated sin in a great and serious 
ay. I know of no Christian theologian who has any 
uch idea, or of any theory of Christ’s work which rests 
pon it. It is a fiction, a theological ghost, used to 
tighten those who are already too timorous of change in 
eligious vocabulary and conceptions. 

But it does not follow from Jesus’ high conception of 
oliness that the inferences underlying the old theories of 
itonement are warranted. Imagine any one attributing 
o Jesus the idea that in God retributive justice is inde- 
endent of love and superior to it, or maintaining that 
esus conceived his own death to be a means of averting 
ar in the nature of God between his rival attributes, 

ercy and justice. These false separations and contrasts 


THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD 269 










270 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


of opposing “ attributes ” in God are radically inconsiste! 
with the Christian concept of God. ‘There is not an imi 
mation in the teaching of Jesus that the uprightness- 
God, his self-preservative holiness, involves an inexorab 
necessity to punish, or creates a bar or obstacle to the @ 
ercise of grace and the bestowment of forgiveness on tl 
penitent. For Jesus the being of God is perfect unit 
perfect harmony. How incongruous with his conception 
are those descriptions in theology which depict him 
rent and torn by contending “attributes,” or even 
drawn in opposite directions by competing emotions, | 
which represent his nature as a forum in which mercy ar 
justice bargain with each other for the maintenance 
their respective rights. These crudities of a false ps 
chology are inconsistent with the teaching of Jesus a 
are barely saved from seeming blasphemous by # 
religious interests which, with good intention, they 
supposed to conserve.? 

It may be worth while to point out that such conce 
tions have no warrant even in the Old Testament. Thi 
reflect a lower conception of God than that attained 
Judaism. Says Professor Skinner : “ The Old Testame 
writers know nothing of the sharp contrast often dra 
by theologians between the righteousness and the mer 
of God. Righteousness and saving activity, so far fre 
being opposed to each other, are harmonious principles 
action in the divine nature; Yahweh is a righteous G 
and a Saviour (Is. xly. 21).”? Dillmann has discussed # 














1 Dr. Tymms aptly calls attention to the kinship between this sort 
separation between the attributes of God, assumed in traditional theolos 
and the dualism and ditheism of Marcion, ‘*‘ the most famous heretic 
the second century.’’ The Christian Idea of Atonement, pp. 22, 23. 

2 Hastings’s D. B. iv. 280. Numerous examples are given in the ¢ 
nection. Cf. Pfleiderer, Glaubenslehre, p. 81: ‘*The Old Testam 
conception of the divine holiness remains also the fixed presuppositi 
for the New Testament doctrine of God which is not ‘replaced by lo} 
(Ritschl), since the self-impartation of God is not to be thought of wi 
out the self-assertion of his perfect will.’’ Acxatoodvn Geod Pfleide 
defines as ‘‘die Ordnung seiner heiligen Liebe, welche dem Fromm 
ein Grund der Hoffnung und des Trostes, wie dem Gottlosen ein Grv 
der Furcht und des Schreckens ist’ (pp. 82, 83). 





























THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD 271 


‘point at length. He shows that the Israelite appealed 
fo the divine righteousness not only in expressing the 
msciousness of his sin, but equally in expressing his 
e of forgiveness and deliverance. The righteousness 
E God saves, as well as condemns. “Thy righteousness,” 
ys the Psalmist, “is like the depth of the sea; thou 
Savest man and beast” (Ps. xxxvi.6). Dillmann points out 
at we designate this second aspect or application of “right- 
sness” aS grace or mercy, because we are accustomed 
distinguish between penal righteousness and grace. 


” because to him “the exercise of grace also belongs 
the nature and righteous rule of God. So far are the 
hteousness and the grace of God from forming, for him, 
contrast, that he rather combines them as interchange- 
dle conceptions, as together constituting the ground of 
ilvation.” Then follow numerous examples of the cor- 
tion, as synonyms, of righteousness, truth, and grace, 
with which 1 John i. 9, “faithful and righteous to 
forgive us our sins,” is compared.! 


1 Alttest. Theol., pp. 273, 274. Professor J. H. Ropes has given this 
unt of the Old Testament conception of righteousness: ‘‘ The right- 
mess of the judge was most commonly thought of by Hebrews with 
ference to his acquittal or vindication of the righteous, rather than with 
ence to his justice in sending retribution upon the wicked. It was 
so much the justice of the judge rendering strictly to each party 
rding to his deserts, which impressed the mind of the Israelites, as 
her the disposition of the judge to do justice to the righteous and down- 
den humble man. As the poor man has no influence by which he 
impress the judge, any consideration shown him must be from right- 
mess alone. Hence righteousness and mercy came to be associated. 
Israelite habitually looked at the justice of a judge from the point of 
, Dot of a disinterested outsider, but of an innocent and defenceless 
for protection. An excellent illustration of this habit of mind is 
. 17, where ‘judge the fatherless’ and ‘plead for the widow’ are 
lel. See also Is. xi. 4; Jer. xxii. 15, 16; Deut. xxiv. 17; Ps. x. 18, 
3... . Thus not only in the general sense of moral excellence 
ection was the righteousness of God frequently referred to by the 
8, but especially in the sense of the judge’s merciful righteousness, 
righteousness of God, who is the supreme ruler and judge, came to 
common expression. Sometimes, indeed, Israelites attributed their 
Punishment to the motive of God’s righteousness (as Neh. ix. 33 ; Dan. ix. 
| 14, ete.), but more frequently they appealed to his righteousness (as we 





























272 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 










It will be remembered that in inspecting the theolog 
cal basis of Dr. Strong’s theory of atonement (p. 178 
we came upon this foundation stone: “That which 
highest in us is highest also in God. As we may be k 
but must be righteous, so God, in whose image we ai 
made, may be merciful, but must be holy.” It is ¢ 
sumed here, of course, that mercy and righteousness, be 
in God and in man, are distinct, separate, and indepe: 
dent attributes. Now this is the verdict which Schul 
says the Old Testament would pronounce upon the m; 
who should regard it as optional with him whether ] 
would be kind and merciful or not: “Integrity mu 
be combined with ‘goodness,’ that the character may 
perfectly trustworthy. Hence Israel believes in # 
goodness of his God. This is in no way antagonistic t 
his righteousness. A man would not be ‘righteous’ if 
was not at the same time benevolent, ready to benef 
and help, and, if need be, to excuse pardonable mi 
takes,” 1 This type of Christian theology thus advocat 
an ethics which is below the standards of Old Testamen 
morality and does not even scruple to ascribe to 
a possible character which the Old Testament wou 
condemn in a man. Nothing can be plainer than the 
the old Protestant theology advocated a conception ¢ 
God which is flatly contradictory to the ethical teac 
ing of the prophets. It might conceivably be contende 
that this circumstance is no objection; that the Ol 
Testament is but a system of weak and beggarly ele 
ments, and (it might be argued), while it may make gra 
a part of righteousness, we are warranted in separatin 


should to his goodness or mercy) when they wished deliverance fro! 
their enemies, or from any need.... The ‘righteous acts of tb 
Lord’ which Samuel recounts to the people (1 Sam. xii. 7) are not, 
we might expect, manifestations of his justice and uprightness, distribu 
ing to ail according to their deserts, but examples of his gracious an 
undeserved goodness to Israel in spite of repeated apostasy and rebellio 
on the nation’s part.’’ Article: ‘“ ‘* Righteousness ? and ‘ The Righteow 
ness of God’ in the Old Testament and in St. Paul,” in the Journal 0 
Biblical Literature, Vol. XXII. Pt. II. (1903), pp. 216-218, ' 

10. T. Theol. Il. 157. 


b 
5 


THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD 273 


| 

‘them and in setting them up in rivalry and contrast. 
But this is not the attitude taken by the theory which, 
‘indeed, assumes special kinship with the Old Testament 
ideas of law and sovereignty. But it is proper to urge 
that the dominant conceptions of the prophets and psalm- 
ists on this subject are likely to accord with those of Jesus 
and, indeed, to underlie them. It is with the prophetic 
conceptions of God and man and religion that the teaching 
and work of Jesus have in general the closest kinship. It 
would be strange, indeed, if Jesus’ doctrine of God, if his 
conceptions of righteousness and mercy in God, were con- 
trary to those of Israel’s greatest ethical teachers. But 
ihe speak of presumptions? All that we can learn of 





the conceptions of Jesus on this subject accords perfectly 
with the prophetic doctrine as understood by such inter- 
| preters as I have quoted. The penal satisfaction theories 
of atonement — and other related theories in so far as they 
share the same premisses— are built upon presuppositions 
that are at once contrary to the Old Testament and irrec- 
oncilable with the teaching of Jesus. 

_ When we turn to the writings of Paul we meet with 
| the phrases, “ the righteousness of God,” and ‘the wrath 
ki God,” used in a judicial sense. The former term is, 
indeed, but infrequently employed to denote an attribute 
of God. The following are examples: “ But if our un- 
tighteousness commendeth the righteousness of God, what 
shall we say?” (Rom. iii. 5); “Whom God set forth 
‘to be a meee eieation . . . to show his righteousness ” 
(Rom. i ili. 25, 26). The context shows that in the first 
of Reso a “righteousness ” means the faithfulness 
or truthfulness of God (ef. vv. 3, 4). His righteous- 
ness is, in this case, his faithfulness to his own nature and 
promises. If men are untrue to him, their falseness will 
but set his righteousness in the stronger relief. In the 
second passage, however, I cannot doubt that it is the 
judicial aspect of God’s nature which “righteousness ” 
is intended to emphasize. Paul is speaking of the work of 
Christ as exhibiting God’s righteousness in such a way as 
to prevent men from supposing that he is lenient toward 











274 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 










sin — in a way which is adapted to counterbalance, as 
were, his indulgent treatment of sin in past times, and 
show that he is not indifferent to it. Hence d:masocd, 
Geod in this passage denotes, or, at least, prominently i 
cludes, that self-respecting quality of holiness in God, th 
reaction of his nature against sin, which must expre 
itself in its condemnation. Here, therefore, the meai 
ing of “righteousness” approximates that of the diy 
wrath! But I believe this to be the only passage in Pa 
where dicatocvvn especially emphasizes this aspect of 
divine nature. 

For the designation of the law and penalty side of Goe 
being and action, the apostle several times employs thé 
phrase épy7 Geod. The term is most frequently used 
the description of the deep depravity of the heathen ar 
Jewish worlds in Rom. i. and ii. “The wrath of Ge 
is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and m 
righteousness of men.” Sinners are described as “ chi 
dren of wrath” (tékva opyfjs) (Eph. ii. 3), “sons 


1Some scholars (e.g. Ritschl, Beyschlag, and Sabatier) deny 
‘‘righteousness ’’ is used, even here, in a judicial sense. They interpret 
it to mean, God’s purpose of grace which pardons and blesses. We 
rejects this interpretation of the word here, but adds: ‘‘ Ritschl, however, 
is perfectly right in rejecting the idea of penal righteousness, for the 
provision of a propitiation is the exact opposite of an execution of penalt 
and just as in the Old Testament sacrificial system there is no such id 
as that of the execution on the victim of the punishment deserved by t 
sinner, so here it is not to be conceived that God exhibited his righte 
ness by executing on Christ the penalty demanded by the law. He ex 
hibited his righteousness, however, through the setting forth of a me 


without being removed by an expiation ordained by him, Now the 
operation of this expiation did not consist (as in the Old Testamer 
merely in the exact performance of a divine requirement ; it first recei 
its expiatory power and effect through faith so that only in the case of 
him who places his trust for salvation upon Christ, is guilt covered by it 
and the grace of God imparted.’’ Bib. Theol. d. N. T., § 80, note 1 
Ropes takes a view of the term in question somewhat similar to that of 
Ritschl. He thinks that the righteousness of God here means his “re- 
deeming righteousness’? — ‘‘that he might be both redeemer and justi- 
fier. The two words are not contrasted.’ Op. cit., p. 226. Morison 
also says that the meaning ‘‘ punitive righteousness,’” held by Meyé 

et al., is too narrow. Critical Exposition of Romans Third, p. 322. 

2 Rom. i. 18; ef. ii. 5, 8; iii. 5. 





: 
: q THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD 275 


disobedience,” upon whom God’s wrath is visited (Col. 
‘iii. 6). This “wrath” is unquestionably presented in a 
certain contrast to mercy. The reprobate Jews are called 
“vessels of wrath fitted unto destruction,” in contrast to 
‘the sons of God chosen from Jews and Gentiles alike, who 
are “ vessels of mercy ” (Rom. ix. 22,23). The “wrath and 
indignation” which await the impenitent and wicked are 
contrasted with the “glory, honor, and peace” which are 
| to those who do good. The wrath of God is 
his holy displeasure against sin. It obviously emphasizes 
another aspect of God’s being and action from that which 
"we express by the terms “mercy” and “ compassion.” 

_ But what is the nature of this contrast? Is it such 
| that in so far as God is angry at sin, he ceases to be 
merciful in feeling toward the sinner? Does wrath fore- 
)stall the operation of mercy until it has been satisfied in 
punishment? Does God’s wrath against sin involve the 
unconditional necessity that he should punish it? Does 
it mean that he cannot forgive sin until he has punished 
‘it? Does wrath stand in contrast to benevolence? Is it 
the negation of love? I believe that all these questions 
must be answered, on Pauline principles, in the negative. 
| The wrath of God is the reaction of his holy love 
Beeinst sin. It is not the opposite of love; it is a part 
}or aspect of love. The opposite of love is hate, and 
God is not described as hating men. Let us see. The 
wrath of God which is denounced against the corrupt 
heathen world (Rom. i. 18) is his indignation against 
‘them for their neglect and contempt of his gracious 
[aislation of himself to them in nature and conscience. 
‘Toward the Jews his indignation burns even more 
fiercely because they have despised his “ goodness, for- 
bearance, and longsuffering,” by which he has sought to 
lead them to repentance. Through all their history they 
have been the objects of his mercy and love. But now, 
| when his affronted love reacts against them in indigna- 
tion, does it follow that he has utterly ceased to be 
gracious? In his wrath does he not remember mercy? 
Read the description of their lapse and of God’s indig- 



























276 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 


nation for their apostasy in Rom. ix., x., and xi. H 
God, then, cries the apostle, utterly cast off his peopl 
Far be it from me to believe so, he answers. He lo 
them, notwithstanding all. Objects of his displeasu 
(éx@po/), indeed, they are, but also “beloved” (ayan 
rot) (Rom. xi. 28), and he closes with a pean of prai 
to God for the love which persists through indignati 
and chastisement, and which will, Paul believes, at leng 
win the victory in “having mercy upon all.” 
Again: when we were yet sinners, we were objects 
God’s wrath (Rom. v. 8,9). Were we not also objec 
of his love and compassion at the same time? Did 
continue to be objects of his wrath alone until aft 
Christ’s death? Does the wrath express the whole 
God’s relation and attitude toward sinners? The ap 
tle’s answer is that while we were yet weak, and sinnel 
and objects of God’s holy displeasure, God loved us a 
sent his Son to save us. It is not in spite of the fact th 
we were sinners and so exposed to God’s wrath, that G 
pitied us and sent Christ for our rescue, but just becau 
we were weak, sinful, and guilty. He would not he 
come to call us to repentance if we had been alres 
righteous. If we had been safe and secure in his faye 
he would have had no occasion to pity us. There is1 
opposition between the idea that in our sin he must ec 
demn us and the fact that he pitied our case and yearn 
to save us. The condemnation and the pity are comp 
ments, counterparts, inseparable constituents of the saz 
love. ; 
Take quite a different example. In Rom. xiii. t 
apostle is discussing the function of civil authority. T! 
magistrate, he declares, is God’s agent or minister, charge 
within a certain sphere, with the execution of the divi 
law. In other words, the state derives its right to puni 
from God, as the representative of his authority, and i 
therefore, an “avenger for wrath for him that doeth evil 
(Rom. xiii. 4). Here, surely, is a penal conception ¢ 
wrath. It is a question of punishing, of visiting wrath 
upon men in the name of God. But is this “ wrath” 


























THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD QT7 


ived as mere, sheer vengeance? Is it independent of 
and separate from it? On the contrary, Paul ex- 
lains that the whole object of these terrors of the law is 
| promote the general good (es ro ayaov, v. 4). The 
rath has its place in conserving the welfare of society, 
is subordinate to that end. Hence, the object to be 
‘tained is a free obedience, not for wrath’s sake, but for 
mscience’ sake (v. 5). The passage is set between 
ese two exhortations: “ Be not overcome of evil, but 
vercome evil with good,” and “ Owe no man anything, 
to love one another (that is the unending obligation 
hich ean never be wholly discharged ) ; for he that lov- 
h th his neighbor hath fulfilled the law.” 

‘The other principal references to God’s wrath are in 
jlossians and Ephesians. In the former epistle Paul 
exhorting the readers to put away those sins “on ac- 
punt of which the wrath of God comes upon the sons of 
lisobedience” (iii. 6). In Ephesians he is describing the 
seness and corruption in which they all, as “sons of 
sobedience,’ — Jews and Gentiles alike,—had lived 
sfore their conversion. On account of these sins they 
were “children of wrath,” objects of displeasure. But 
they nothing more? Did that wrath mean the pre- 


Fate or negation of love? The apostle continues : 





But God, being rich in mercy, for his great love where- 
ie he loved us, quickened us together with Christ” 
| According to Paul, wrath and mercy are complemen- 

factors of the divine love. Wrath denotes the holy 

| ale his pity or compassion tow a the sinful and 
deserving. They are distinguishable, but not separate ; 
hey do not conflict. They may properly be said to con- 
ition one another, although such expressions are not 
te existence or action of the elements of God’s perfection. 
it we cannot wholly avoid such expressions. They may 


Eph. ii. 4, 5). 
ignation of God against wilful sin; merey or grace 
| hey are contrasts, but not contraries. They codperate ; 
holly unobjectionable, since they seem to imply a sepa- 
erye a useful and necessary purpose if we simply mean to 


278 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 

















indicate by them that God must act as he is, according 


illustrate mere geniality, any more than they can proe 
from vindictiveness alone. God is one. His perfecti 
are in eternal unity and harmony. There is a per 
accord of his will with his nature. There is no riva 
among his perfections, no peril of war in his being. 
attribute does not treat or traffic with another. No ¢ 
ment of his moral nature is independent of the othe 
There is no one of his attributes which must be satis! 
before some other can have play. The idea that cert 
elements of God’s character subsist in his will and s 
in his essence is absurd. The separation of the “ disp 
tion” of God from his ‘nature ” as the basis of a parti 
among the qualities of his character, is an example of t 
hypostatizing of abstractions which was common in 
scholastic metaphysics. It is as unphilosophical as t 
crude psychology which conceived the soul as consist 
of separate “ faculties,” after the manner of a ship b 
in water-tight compartments. Such notions derive 
port from Paul only by a superficial use of isolated wo 
and phrases, arbitrarily defined and applied in utter di 
gard of the inner organism of his thought. 

We should reach no essentially different result i 
examined in detail the biblical conception of holine 
This term denotes, alike in the Old Testament and in 
New, the moral purity of God. It is never used in 
sense of mere retributive justice. In pre-prophetic ti 
the notion of God’s greatness and majesty is prominent i 
the conception of his holiness. The priestly writers en 
phasize his holiness under the aspect of Yahweh’s jeal 
care for the purity of his worship. In the prophets 
conception rises to its greatest ethical height. His | 
ness is that quality in him which makes him * of too p 
eyes to behold evil” (Hab. i. 13). While holiness mi 
fests itself, upon occasion, as punitive righteousness, 
by no means synonymous with it. It is a much bro 


1 See the articles on ‘‘ Holiness in the Old Testament and New 7 
ment”? by Professor Skinner and the present writer, in Hastings’s D 


THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD 279 


and “‘embraces every distinctive attribute of God- 
head” (Skinner). It is a name for “ moral perfectness.” 
G yd is “the Holy One of Israel”; holiness is a designation 
for his ethical nature, conceived especially in contrast to 
all sin and evil, but it is appropriately pointed out by 
ann that the Old Testament never designates God 
i the wrathful One of Israel,” the God whose primary 
tribute is penal righteousness. 
The holiness of God is not differently understood in the 
ew Testament. It comprehends both “ the goodness and 
he severity of God”; it issues alike in redemption and in 
udgment. It is quite as accordant with God’s holiness 
seek to recover men from sin to likeness to himself as it 
-to condemn and punish persistent, wilful sin. In the 
New Testament, as in the Old, God is represented as call- 
ig men to repentance and obedience, just because he is 
holy. The summons is: “Be ye holy, for I am holy” 
1 Pet. i. 16). The term “holy” is but seldom applied 
0 God in the New Testament, but the idea expressed by 
it is constantly assumed. God is self-preserving purity ; 
is holiness is, as we may say, his eternal moral self- 
hespect — exaltation above and hostility to all sin. But 
his holiness stands in no opposition to his grace and is no 
ir to its operation; in fact, grace, compassion, equity, 
md generosity are elements of holiness. The Johannine 
| oa especially, bring out this fulness and richness 
of the divine holiness. “Holy Father,” Jesus prays, 
) keep them in thy name which thou hast given me” (Jn. 
ftv. 11). Here the holiness of the Father is his absolute 
oodness to which the appeal is made that he would guard 
he disciples of Jesus from all evil. Holiness appears in 
he aspect of the guardian watch care of God for the flock 
jf Christ. The notion of the divine righteousness is the 
ame, as is seen in a parallel expression a few verses 
farther on, “O righteous Father, the world knew thee 
jot, but I knew thee,” etc. The righteousness of God 
ere appears as the quality which prevents him from pass- 
























* Nirgends lesen wir ‘ der Zornige Israels,’ wie ‘ der Heilige Israels.’ ’’ 
Theol., p. 261. : 





























280 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTE 


ing the same judgment upon Christ’s disciples as he pa 
upon the sinful world. It is the equitableness of God, 
moral self-consistency, his justice to his own equi 
Essentially the same idea is found in the First Epis 
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righte 
(micros kat dixaos) to forgive us our sins” (1 Jn. i, 
Here God’s righteousness is coupled with his fidelity 
his nature and promises as the gracious, forgiving ( G 
The whole context carries the idea that God is so 
eous that he will certainly forgive them that repent. 
is but a reproduction of a prophetic idea. Yet there is 
a priori theology which insists that God’s righteousnes 
an obstacle to forgiveness ; that God’s righteousness is 
unconditional necessity to punish sin. 

It is in this epistle that the moral nature of Goc 
twice summed up in the saying: “God is love” (1 
iv. 8, 16). But we are reminded by the advocates 
penal theories that it is also said that “ God is lig 
(1 Jn. i. 5), the intimation being that this means tf 
God’s essential nature is penal righteousness, that is, t 
God must inflict its full penalty upon all sin. 17 
formula, “God is light,” is said by the writer of 
epistle to be the sum and substance of the message wh 
he derived from Christ. The interpretation in questi 
then, would amount to this: The burden of Jesus’ te 
ing — the sum of his revelation of God is, that God 
and must punish all sin, because the primary attribute 
his nature is avenging righteousness. Whether t 
which John had learned from Jesus, and had come m 
and more to understand, was, primarily, that God } 
wrath, we will leave the reader to judge. In itself 
figure of light is as well adapted to express the ides 
God’s self-revealing, self-imparting goodness, as tha) 
purity in contrast to evil. Why should it not inel 
both, as the Johannine conception of the divine love 
tainly does? “God is light” does mean that God isp 
or holy; but so, also, does the statement that “ God is le ‘ 
But neither excludes the divine grace, nor expresses 


1So Strong, Systematic Theology, p. 129. 


: © THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD 281 


contrast with it. The concept of light is used in pre- 
cisely the same combinations of thought in this epistle as 
the concept of love; indeed, the ficure of light is merged 
into the description of love as constituting the essence of 
Godlike life, as of God himself. The interpretation of 
“light” as meaning punitive righteousness totally dis- 
egards the context in which it is used and the course of 
hought in the epistle as a whole, and attributes to the 
writer the absurd assertion that the burden of Jesus’ mes- 
age concerning God was that he is inexorably compelled 
o punish all sin. In point of fact, the term “light” is a 
gurative designation for love.! 

But Paul is the chief resort of those who maintain that 
od may be merciful, but must be just, that is, must neces- 
arily punish all sin. Let us see how the case stands. 
“That which is highest in us is highest also in God.” 
“Mercy is optional with him”’;? it must also be such for 
us. Retributive righteousness is highest in God; it would, 
— be the highest quality, the loftiest reach of per- 
ection in us. Well, Paul has written a short treatise on 
he nature of true virtue which we know as 1 Cor. 

ii. There he has stated what is the “ highest” in human 
sharacter and, presumably, in God, since Godlikeness is the 
est and measure of all goodness in man. We ought, then, 
oread: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of 
ngels, but have not penal righteousness, I am become 
ounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And though I 
ave the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all 
nowledge ; and though I have all faith, so as to remove 
ountains, but fall short of likeness to God in his pri- 
nary attribute of punitive justice, ] am nothing. Other 
irtues shall pass away or be fulfilled in higher forms of 
irtue, but the necessity to punish remains as the one 
‘supreme excellence. And now abideth faith, hope, and 
etributive righteousness, these three; but the greatest of 
hese is retributive righteousness.” In the penal satisfac- 





























me: 





1 Augustine’s remark concerning John’s writings is quite true, Locu- 
S est multa, sed prope omnia de caritate. 
2Strong, Philosophy and Religion, p. 196. 


282 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 



























tion revision of the New Testament another Pauline p 
sage would undergo considerable modification. It is t 
splendid description of what is “highest in man” wh 
he rises into a new Godlike life with Christ and learns 
set his affections on things that are above (Col. iii. 1 
This is the catalogue of the ascending scale of vi 
into which as a new man in Christ he is required tor 
(with the single change proposed by the penal theolog: 
“Put on therefore, as God’s elect, holy and beloved, 
heart of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, lo; 
suffering; forbearing one another, and forgiving 
other, if any man have a complaint against any; ever 
the Lord forgave you, so also do ye; and above all tl 
things put on distributive justice, which is the bond 
perfectness.” The reader may take his choice betwe 
the two versions, — between the penal and the Pauli 
theology. He cannot, without contradiction, hold both 
It should be said at once, however, that the 
majority of present-day theologians hold with the apos' 
and with the New Testament generally, that what sho 
be highest in us 7s highest in God, namely, love. 11 
give a few examples : — 
“The saying of the apostle, ‘God is love,’ is the b 
compendium of the Christian idea of God.” “Love 
the supreme, the only adequate definition of the esse 
of God.” 2 ‘God himself is good only as he is love, 
his holiness and his righteousness depend upon his loye 
“God is love, the perfect, the absolutely good and ot 
good Being, so that no attribute or activity can be aseri 
to him which cannot be derived from his love.” * 
would be easy greatly to extend the list of such que 
tions. It is the well-known characteristic of present- 


1 Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, I. 269. 

2 Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, I. 454. 

3 Julius Miller, The Christian Doctrine of Sin, I. 118. 

4C. I. Nitzsch, System der christlichen Lehre, p. 145. 

5 See, e.g., Sartorius, The Doctrine of Divine Love, pp. 8, 9; 
‘‘Die Liebe ist die vornehmste unter den Eigenschaften Gottes,” 
Dogmatik, p. 181; F. A. B. Nitzsch, ‘‘ Sie (Liebe) ist Ziel und Kr 
etc., Dogmatik, p. 405; Lipsius, Dogmatik, pp. 278, 279. This au 


THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD 283 


‘theological thought that it starts from the conceptions of 
God’s fatherhood and love, as the old theology started 
from the notion of his justice, conceived as the principle 
of retribution and punishment. This point of view is 
primarily and predominantly legal; the thought of to-day 
isethical. In this we see a return to the biblical stand- 
point. There righteousness and holiness are not con- 
trasts to love, but synonyms of love; they are kindred to 
it, not independent of it. The a priori definitions of these 
‘terms in books of theology as having nothing in common 
with goodness, benevolence, or grace, and as meaning an 
‘unconditional necessity to punish, are radically unbiblical ; 
they were never derived from Scripture and cannot be 
harmonized with it. These arbitrary descriptions of the 
divine attributes, it is safe to say, are sanctioned by no 
first-rate recent authority in exegesis or biblical theology. 
It has been necessary to bring out into strong relief this 
‘contrariety between the old dogmatic definitions out of 
which the legal interpretations of atonement were spun, 
and the actual biblical conceptions of God, because here 
is the parting of the ways. The penal theories are right 
if their initial definitions of God’s ethical nature are 
correct. But I have deemed it worth while to show — 
largely by appeal to the most eminent experts in exegesis 
—that, whether right or wrong, they are not biblical. I 
shave no Pe ieinon in pronouncing them fundamentally 
erroneous. The old theories of atonement are not built 
upon the Christian concept of God. They were con- 
structed without any study of the history and contents of 
that concept. They are a priori, speculative, arbitrary 
constructions, with no proper basis in exegesis or history. 
The most extreme of these forms of thought — the penal 
satisfaction theory —is built up in violation and defiance 





defines love as the ‘‘higher unity’’ of God’s attributes, inclusive of his 
goodness and his righteousness. ‘‘This higher conception of the right- 
eousness of God,”’ adds Lipsius, that is, the conception of it as ‘‘ fatherly ”” 
and of the same nature with love, ‘‘ although it is definitely enough set 
forth in the Holy Scriptures, is entirely wanting in our dogmaticians, who 
conceive righteousness predominantly as penal, and in no case extend it 
beyond the sphere of the moral law of God.” 




































284 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTR LN 


of the biblical concept of God. Its definitions negati 
point blank the conclusions of the most capable and t 
prejudiced exegesis. 

Even conservative writers who are very slow to bre: 
with long-established usage in theological thought ul 
speech are beginning to see and to acknowledge this fae 
We have already noted several examples in the cautiol 
admissions of those who seek to maintain a quasi or ser 
penal view of Christ’s death.1_ I will give one other illu 
tration. The late Professor Candlish observes that tl 
old theories of atonement “ have mainly proceeded on # 
plan of taking from Scripture the idea of righteousness, an 
interpreting this by various philosophic assumptions, whi 
the series of statements about our union with Christ in h 
death have been overlooked or little used. To this,” 
adds, ‘appears to be due a certain hardness in all the 
forms of doctrine, as well as some of their theoretic dif 
culties, and a natural reaction against these led to t 
emphasizing of the neglected elements of Pauline ai 
Johannine teaching.” 2 i 

We conclude, then, (1) that the righteousness an 
holiness of God are, almost invariably, comprehensive de 
ignations in Scripture and include not merely the sel 
affirming purity, but also the self-imparting impulse, t 
benevolence or grace of God. In no case do they dene 
mere retributive justice. (2) Love is the best name f 
the moral character of God, that is, of course, holy loy 
a love that is at once gracious and righteous. (3) Jest 
favorite name for God was “ Father,” and this term co 
notes original, creative, sustaining, and self-imparting loy 
(4) The separation of the moral attributes of God, 
method of setting them up in independence, rivalry, am 
contrast, impairs the conception of the divine unity and is 
false in its psychological assumptions as it is unseriptural 
its applications and results. (5) God’s perfections are 
eternal unity and harmony, and his procedure in the work 


1 See pp. 190-197. 2 The Christian Salvation, p. 49. — 
8 « Righteousness’? is used in this sense in the Pharisaic Psalms 
Solomon (ii. 16; viii. 29, 30, 32; ix. 8, 10). 


THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPT OF GOD 285 





‘ 
salvation is in accordance with them all. The notion that 
they compete, rival, obstruct, or checkmate one another 
is crudely anthropomorphic and philosophically absurd. 
God must act as he is, in consistency and conformity with 
his total nature. The distinctions of independent and 
dependent, of necessary and optional attributes, of consti- 
tutional and voluntary perfections, are devised ex post 
facto as means of defending an orthodox rationalism 
which cannot subsist without resort to such desperate 
expedients. Definitions and conclusions alike are un- 
hilosophical and unscriptural. (6) It is false to assert 
at the primary note in the Christian concept of God is 
hat he must always and unconditionally punish all sin. 
t is false to assert that he cannot forgive sin until he 
as punished it. To say that his holiness interposes an 
bstacle to forgiveness which must first be removed by 
sacrifice or suffering, is inconsistent with the biblical con- 
cept of God. The statement that the offering of animal 
sacrifices in the Old Testament, or even the death of Christ 
in the New, is the ground of forgiveness, is also unwar- 
anted. The assertion cannot be harmonized with the 
aching of the prophets or with that of Jesus himself. 
he ground of forgiveness is the grace of God or what the 
ebrew prophets call the “ righteousness of God ” — what- 
ver may be its conditions, means, and accompaniments.! 
| In one of the discourses which compose Dwight’s 
heology (11. 200) the author is descanting upon the inex- 
rable character of the divine law. It must be, he says, 
Meriably executed. Its penalties are fixed and sure. 
s a biblical warrant for this unconditional necessity to 
unish, he quotes the prophetic word: “The soul that 











1 “Grace is, indeed, the highest category under which we can think 
f God. It rises as much above righteousness as righteousness rises 
bove the category under which natural religion conceives God, that, 
amely, of Might directed by intelligence. A God of righteousness is 
| ertainly a great advance upon a God of mere power; yet it is only a 
p upward toward a higher idea of God, in which the divine Being 
}»ecomes self-communicating, redeeming Love. God cannot be said to 
| 1ave been fully revealed till he has been revealed in this aspect.”? A. B. 

ruce, The Chief End of Revelation, p. 59. 

i 


’ 



















286 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE D O 


sinneth, it shall die ” (Ezek. xviii. 20).! “This t 
ing of the law against transgression,” he decle 
absolute. In it there is no mention, and plai 


transgressor.” I happen to possess the copy of this y 
which belonged to the late Professor Samuel Harris. | 
the margin opposite the above assertion he has wi 
“ False! The very next words are, ‘If he turn from 


assurance of pardon to penitents.” The incident il 
trates at once the exegetical methods by which th 
theories were maintained and the nature of the appea 
history and fact by which they have been discredited. 


1 The author overlooks the fact, by the way, that his applicatir 
this passage would exclude the possibility of substitution, or, indee 
exercise of mercy on any terms. If the sinner must unconditio 
suffer the penalty of his sin, then both substitution and salvation ai 
of the question. 


CHAPTER II 
THE PERSONALITY OF THE SAVIOUR 


_ Iris commonly regarded as an axiom in theology that 
‘the opinion which is held concerning the person of Christ 
will determine the conception of his saving work. We 
have seen that the theory of Anselm rested entirely upon 
a certain conception of Christ’s person. He must be man 
in order to be competent to render what was due to God 
‘from man, and he must be God in order to be able to do 
what man is powerless to do. This conception, in less 
precise and definite form, is seen to be reflected in the 
various types of orthodoxy; the efficacy of the atonement, 
itis said, implies both the divinity and the humanity of 
‘our Lord. 

__ If by this contention is meant that the saving value of 
(Christ’s work for men is dependent upon the truth of any 
one of the theories of his person which have obtained, at 
different periods, in ecclesiastical history, it would appear 
Ome quite unwarranted. Would any one maintain, for 
example, that Christ’s saving power is involved in the 
question, disputed in ancient theology, whether the human 
nature which he assumed in the incarnation was personal 
orimpersonal? Will it be contended that the import of 
the Master’s sufferings is dependent upon the questions 
at issue between the earlier Christologies and Kenoticism? 
here are undoubtedly individuals who would make claims 
: this sort, but I find no evidence that the foremost writers 





nm the subject are disposed to pivot their views of atone- 
ent upon any specific Christological theory. Indeed, it 
$a noticeable fact that these writers do not discuss the 
octrine of the person of Christ. A certain general view 
of his character and mission is, of course, presupposed, but 
287 








288 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTE 





































there is no disposition to claim an exclusive validity a 
value for any one of the numerous speculations whi 
have been advanced regarding the mystery of his persor 

I cannot doubt, however, that all students of the subje 
would agree that the view taken of Christ himself is | 
great importance in any effort to determine the metho 
and nature of his saving work. We must, therefore, befor 
proceeding farther, raise the question: What assumptior 
concerning the personality of Christ are fundamental 1 
belief in his saving power? Why should he, and no oth 
be regarded as the Saviour of the world? This questi 
gives rise to others, such as these: How shall we det 
mine what views of Christ are of fundamental importe 
in this connection? To what sources of information sh 
we resort in order to ascertain and define these nece 
sary assumptions? Some, of course, would answer, To # 
authorized creeds. This is the appeal to authority. B 
when one remembers that official orthodoxy is, after ¢ 
only the doctrine that won by a majority vote, he is ¢ 
terred from hinging too much upon the mere success - 
an opinion. For myself, I would take the question im 
the light of the consciousness of Christ himself. I don 
however, overlook the fact, that this appeal is attend 
with some difficulty. We have no direct access to fl 
consciousness of Jesus; we are dependent upon reports 
his words made by others, upon reflections cast by 
inner life upon the minds and hearts of his discipk 
Still, of all the attempts to picture the personality 
Christ, the New Testament must ever remain the phe 
graph which is nearest to the life. To this source, th 
let us go with our question: What peculiarities in his 
personality did Jesus himself regard as essential to I 
work as the Saviour of the world? 

One of the most unique and significant factors in t 
consciousness of Jesus is his convietion of his own sinl 
holiness.| Not that he was constantly asserting his 
dom from sin; such a self-assertion could hardly ha 
failed to arouse suspicion regarding the clarity and can 
of his moral consciousness. He is never said to ha 


« 


THE PERSONALITY OF THE SAVIOUR 289 





categorically asserted his sinlessness. According to the 
| Fourth Gospel he once uttered the challenge, “ Which of 
you convicteth me of sin?” (Jn. viii. 46); but it is not 
“quite certain that these words are meant in an absolute, 
ee sense. YIt is not on the ground of assertions 
made by Jesus himself that the Cleeseea world believes 
F in his perfection. The more immediate reasons for that 
belief are these: (1) the fact that his life reveals to us, 
under the closest scrutiny, no moral stain; and (2) the 
fact that those who companied with him, friends and foes 
alike, received and attested the same impression.) Here 
‘was a man who seemed to those who knew him in the 
flesh to be holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from 
sinners, and whose spirit, purposes, and deeds have ever 
since seemed to those who have contemplated them to be 
free from all admixture of sin. He was tempted, without 
yielding. He lived in constant contact with evil, without 
‘contracting it. He was a friend of publicans and sinners, 
but was untainted by their sordidness and selfishness. 

. 'The sinlessness of Jesus was something more than inno- 
jcence; it was fulness, positive seSerseo of life.) Jesus 
jwas no recluse; his holiness was no cloistered virtue. 
‘His character was not of that negative, ascetic type whose 
ideal is to escape from the sinful world and dwell apart in 
holy contemplation. Nor did his perfection consist in a 
repression or toning down of any of the legitimate powers 
of manhood. He mingled freely with his fellow-men at 
their work and their recreations, in their joy s and in their 
sorrows. His life was always at its maximum of energy 
‘and strength. He had no fear of being soiled by contact 
with the world. He joined his brother-men in the strug- 
gles of life and the battle with sin, proving himself to 
many the Captain of their salvation, leading them on to 
victory and strength. These are qualities and powers 
without which Jesus could not have been the Saviour. | He 
qualified himself to be the Redeemer by the achievement 
of the perfect life; he attained completeness through his 
experience of trial, conquest, and suffering and so became 
the author of life to all who will join themselves to him. 











290 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRID 















Our Lord well knew what sin was. He had felt 
attractive, seductive power. At the beginning of } 
ministry the path to an easy victory had opened befo 
him if he would but bow to the requirements of the a 
and consent to be the wonder-worker whom popular mé 
sianic thought demanded; but he saw that this would 
but a false and hollow success. His soul was most sens 
tive to the approach and suggestions of evil; he deteet 
it under its most winsome and deceptive disguises. — 
vain did Satan clothe himself as an angel of light; in ve 
did his suggestions take on the guise of plausibility ai 
prudence; the answer was the same, Get thee behind m 
And with what a piercing glance did he discern the | 
ing selfishness in the thoughts of other men. He cor 
detect the taint of hypocrisy in the prayers of the se 
righteous, the intolerance which often underlay religio 
zeal, the envy and meanness that sought to cloak the 
selves in an ostentatious generosity. None ever saw 
clearly and exposed so plainly the sinfulness of other me: 
yet he confessed no sin of his own; he betrayed no co 
sciousness of an evil bias or a selfish motive. Just he 
lies the supreme proof of the sinless holiness of Chr 
It is impossible that one who knew and judged sin as 
did could have failed to find and confess it in himse 
unless he had been conscious of a perfectly holy inner li 
This is the moral miracle of Jesus; this is the transee 
dent, inexplicable wonder of his person. Men have tri 
to exalt him by ascribing to him all manner of metaph 
ical characteristics and powers; but|that which the 
pels place in the forefront of their portraiture is just tl 
moral completeness, this perfectly filial consciousness, tl 
stainless, untainted holiness. 

Without this he could not have been the Saviour; wi 
it he could not but be. Perfect holiness fits him for p 
fect sympathy with sinners; perfect love enables him 
bear the burdens of a sinful world. Law, righteousne 
purity —does he not know what these are? They a 
the very breath of his own inner life. Is he not able’ 
honor and exalt them? They are enthroned in his eve 


THE PERSONALITY OF THE SAVIOUR 291 





thought; they preside over his every act. If a pure spirit 
ike his ever visits our prison-house, he will surely never 
ondone our sin, and will open no door of escape except 
through purification, and will offer us no refuge and no 
safety save in a holiness like his own. Here is One who 
nows sin as no other ever knew it, who judges it as God 
judges. His eye discerns its blighting, soul-destroying 
power; he sees it black against the white radiance of the 
eternal love. If he undertakes to save men, he will save 
them from sin to holiness. Let his method be what it will; 
be his specific experiences in our world what they may, 
there is but one conceivable way in which Holy Love can 
recover sinful man, and that is by destroying sin through . 
eplacing it—by winning men into sympathy, contact, 
eer: to the life of holy love in God. 





_|Another characteristic of the personality of Jesus was 
his singularly fraternal feeling for men, his close sympa- 
thetic union with them./ He was truly a man to whom 
[thing human was alien — one with whom the promotion 
of others’ good was a passion. This was, perhaps, his 

ost striking peculiarity. His holiness did not remove 
him from other men, but drew him to them and made him 
one with them. His ideal of greatness was found in ser- 
Hee and self-giving ; these were the test and measure of 
greatness in others ; they were equally the form of his own 
perfection. He came to minister, to be servant of all, to 

ive his life a ransom for many. He was not, indeed, 
constantly professing his humility, his desire to serve and 
bless, his eager interest in others; that would have been 


i 
i 


an ostentation. He just lived an unpretentious life of 
: ie devotion to the highest good of his brother-men. 

is was the perfectly useful life. | His one concern was 
0 awaken and foster the higher aspirations in men.| He 
aught and labored and suffered to win them to the life 
hat is worth living, the life of Godlike sympathy, ser- 
ice, and helpfulness; he died that men might not live 
mto themselves (2 Cor. v. 15). 

As we read the most original descriptions which we 
ossess of what Jesus said and did, we receive the impres- 































292 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 


sion that he conceived himself as the heaven-sent 
of man. He made the suffering and sinful lot of men 
chief care. He bade the weary and burdened come 
him and find peace in a serene trust in God like his o 
He went about his appointed task of preaching good t 
ings to the poor, proclaiming release to captives, and 
ting at liberty them that were bruised. This is the ¥ 
in which Jesus himself talked about his saving wo 
When men asked him what were the conditions of obta 
ing eternal life, the substance of his answer was: Be 
living the eternal life here and now; adopt and obey 
law of love and you shall live; give your life in self-dei 
ing helpfulness and you will save it. But one who | 
any familiarity with theology cannot state these sim 
teachings of Jesus without a keen sense of their piti 
inadequacy when judged by the tests of the theoretic o 
salutis of theological tradition. There is no gospel i 
this, we are told; this is no Christian doctrine of sal 
tion; Jesus, indeed, had no gospel to preach; for that 
must look to the reflections and arguments of others. 
this teaching of Jesus about the love and fatherhoot 
God is meaningless until the light of subsequent apost 
thought is thrown upon it and the doctrines of expiat 
and propitiation enable us to assign to it some intellig 
significance and value. It would be quite impossible 
theological traditionalism not to betray an ill-disgui 
impatience with the teaching of Jesus. Is this all? ? is 
attitude ; salvation by mere repentance and reformati 
eternal life obtainable on the purely sentimental condit 
of living the life of love; God as willing to forgive mei 
that weak- minded father in the parable! Where is 
justice? Is there no wrath to be appeased? What 
man’s back debts? What of his accumulated 
Has God no legislation to enforce, no moral governm 
to protect ? 

From the standpoint in question these defects — 
fatal and decisive. The doctrine of expiation is not he 
But one of two courses remains: either the doetr 
must be forced from the word “ransom” and from M 





THE PERSONALITY OF THE SAVIOUR 293 


_ thew’s phrase, “for the forgiveness of sins,” or the teaching 
of Jesus must be surrendered as a source of the real theo- 
logical gospel. Not infrequently the effort and the admis- 
sion are conjoined, the admission tacitly attesting the 
futility of the effort. 

It may be questioned, however, whether if we had an ade- 
quate appreciation of Jesus’ simple teaching, we should be 
so ready to deny that it is a gospel, or to exclaim: Is this 
all? I believe that if we had a deeper and truer sense of 
what the divine love is and of what it can do; if we even 
knew what human love, in its perfection, is, we should 
not form so light an estimate of a teaching which declared 
| that love is the sum of all law and all duty. I believe 
that if we could adequately apprehend the nature of that 
‘union with man into which our Lord entered by virtue 
of his unfathomable love, we should be less disposed to 
depreciate it as nothing but a sentimental sympathy. I 
cannot help feeling that. if we knew the depths of his 
meaning when he spoke of coming to minister even unto 
death on behalf of mankind, we might not feel the neces- 
sity of supplementing that conception with some supposed 
|) profundity from Paul in order that it might be worthy of 
a place in our theology. For myself, I must incur the 
reproach of breaking with our theological tradition en- 
tirely at this point. I find the gospel, and the whole 
gospel, in Jesus himself, presented with a clarity, a sim- 
plicity, a transcendent beauty and matchless power no- 
where equalled. I believe that our traditional theology 
lightly esteems it because it measures his words by its own 
artificial distinctions and learned superficiality. Even 
though I be arraigned for “talking down to St. Paul,” I 
protest my belief that Jesus came to preach the gospel, and 
that in word and life and death he did preach it, and that 
all subsequent expositions of that gospel, whether apos- 
tolic or post-apostolic, are but “broken lights” of him. 

We could wish that our access were more immediate 
than it is to the sayings of Jesus concerning himself and 
his relation to mankind. We have to see him through 
the medium of the reports, impressions, and reflections of 


ESS 





SSS 













































2994 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


others, in all cases recorded after a considerable lapse 
time. In some instances these reports are strongly ec 
ored by inferences and theories which were rife in t 
various Christian circles of the period. Our earliest wi 
ness, the apostle Paul, has very little to say of the wort 
and deeds of Jesus; his interest centres almost entirel 
in a philosophy as to the import of his death, resurrectio 
and exaltation. The Johannine tradition, though keenl 
alive to the importance of his earthly life, narrates i 
story in the forms and terms of a pronounced type 
religious and theological reflection. Even the Synop 
Gospels are not without their apologetic features. Whe 
therefore, the student contemplates his sources historica 
and not in accordance with an a priori theory, and reme 
bers that all our primitive Christian documents are wri 
ten in a different language from that employed by o 
Lord, we see that we have no access to the ipsissima ver 
of Jesus and are deterred from hinging too much up 
individual words and phrases. We must be content wi 
the broad outlines of his teaching concerning himself at 
with the impressions to which his life gave rise in r 
earliest witnesses and communities whose testimonies ha 
been preserved to us. 

‘There can be no doubt that Jesus spoke of himself 
the Son of man, the Founder of the Kingdom of Heay 
on earth, the Revealer of the Father to men, the Frie 
of sinners, who had come to show them the way of f 
giveness and peace. In a word, he made man’s case I 
own; it was his passion to reveal to men their possib 
sonship to God and to help them to realize it.) Accor 
ingly we find that his life produced the impression that 
was the typical, representative, ideal man. Some ha 
found this idea directly expressed in Jesus’ favorite sel 
designation, “the Son of man.” But if this interpret 
tion may not be justified ; if the term is rather a messiam 
title, still the notion in question lies near to hand. 4 
the Founder and Head of the Kingdom of the Godli 
on earth, Jesus was conscious of a unique relation, as of 
unique mission, to mankind. ‘ 


t ® 
THE PERSONALITY OF THE SAVIOUR 295 


| In what forms, let us ask, has this aspect of the life- 
york of Jesus left its traces upon primitive Christian 
hhought. One of the most striking is Paul’s conception 
: him as the second Adam, the Man from heaven, the 





Tounder of a new humanity. He is to Paul’s mind the 
ounterpart of the natural head of the race. “As in 
Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” 
‘1 Cor. xv. 22). ‘As through the one man’s disobedience 
he many were made sinners, even so through the obedience 
i the one shall the many be made righteous” (Rom. v. 
9). In the Epistle to the Hebrews the conception is that 
esus was the spiritual Priest of mankind who became 
me with his fellows in temptation and suffering that he 
ight succor the tempted and “ deliver them who through 
he fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bond- 
ge » (Heb. ii. 15,18). Again, he is the Chieftain who 
afely leads his followers to victory over suffering and 
E He is one who has trodden the path on which we 
ust go. He learned obedience through the discipline 
ftrial and pain. He is himself the typical man of faith 
Ind as such can be the perfecter of our trust in God. In 
word, he is the Leader, the Example, the Representative, 
nd thus the true High Priest of mankind. In the Johan- 
ine books he appears as the bearer and embodiment of 
é divine love to man—the Messenger of the eternal 
fe—through whom we are brought into union and 
sllowship with God. He is the Holy One who challenges 
ery man who hopes in him to purify himself even as 
eis pure. Here, too, he appears as the Paraclete, the 
dvocate of mankind, who pleads the cause of his friends 
efore God; he is the vine in which they abide as 
anches ; he is the Good Shepherd who gives even his 
fe itself for his sheep. 
|| Such are some of the various forms in which the repre- 
ntative relation of Jesus to men is expressed. They are 
€ witnesses to the impression made by his life and per- 
lpnality. They testify at once to the reality and to the 
leality of his humanity. They describe his fitness, his 
mpetence to be the Saviour. In hin, for the first time, 
















296 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 























we see humanity at its climax. In him only do we le 
what our moral personality means; in him we find 
some of the old divines said, the * recapitulation ” of 
humanity. We can rest our case with him; where 
leads we may confidently follow ; we can trust his i 
pretation of life and of death ; through his assuring }j 
we dare to hope in God’s mercy and to believe in the 
of eternal life here in the midst of time and change. 
But there is another class of representations of y 
we must take account. They are those which dese 
our Lord’s unique relation to God. According to 
Gospels he conceived himself as the Son of God; he 
sessed a peculiar sense of God’s fatherhood. It is a 
ticeable circumstance that while he regards God as 
Father of all men, he never classes himself and other 1 
under the same category as sons of God in the same sel 
In speaking to men of God he says “my Father”; 
“your Father,” but not “our Father.” It is not opet 
question that he regarded his own sonship to Got 
involving a special, incomparable relation. There iss 
peculiarly close union, some unique fellowship betw 
him and the Father. In some exceptional sense he 
say that only the Father knows the Son and the Son al 
knows the Father (Mt. xi. 27). Now, the notion of 
ship to God is familiar to us from the Old Testam 
The Son of God —the nation, the king, or the m 
trate —is the special object of God’s love and fay 
Between them there is a unique mutual knowledge 
fellowship. This idea must guide us here. JAs So 
God par excellence Jesus is the special Representative an 
Revealer of God; he is like the only begotten son ¢ 
father (Jn. i. 14), on whom the paternal love is cont 
trated. \ 
The title was doubtless a messianic designation, am 
yet it must have expressed for the consciousness of Jest 
much more than any official title could include. It 
the symbol of what was most peculiar and characteri 
in the inner life of Jesus: his sense of a unique relat 
to God out of which grew his sense of his unique missiol 






























THE PERSONALITY OF THE SAVIOUR 297 


The full and precise nature of that union of the Son with 
the Father we are unable adequately to define; we can 
only see it on the side which is turned toward us. But we 
an understand it well enough to see that it is clothed 
with rich and intelligible meanings. We can apprehend 
it im the light in which Jesus himself and the New Testa- 
ment writers, in general, have presented it to us. The 
whole stress of New Testament teaching is laid upon 
he conception that Jesus is the Mediator and Saviour 
use he is the unique Revealer and Interpreter of God. 
As the Fourth Gospel expresses it: This well-beloved 
5on who dwells in the bosom of the Father, he hath inter- 
preted (e&nyjcaTo) God to men (Jn. i. 18). It is true 
hat we observe in Paul and in the Fourth Gospel the 
beginnings of that long course of Christological specula- 
jon which eventuated in the Nicene and Chalcedonian 
ereeds, but it is a fair question whether the terms employed 
‘n these writings have not been read by later thought in a 
too severely speculative sense; that is, whether the pri- 
y object of the use of such terms as “logos,” “image 
of God, * and “wisdom of God” was not pexctical fee 

ligious, rather than metaphysical. The more I have 
onsidered the matter, the more probable it has seemed to 
me that these writers seized upon such terms of philo- 
sophic speech as were available to them in order to express 
their sense of the unique character and revealing, saving 
ificance of Christ, and not with the intention of pro- 
sing a speculative theory of his person. Be that as it 


fessenger and Minister of the divine mercy to mankind, 
i¢ Revealer of God, the perfect Teacher, the pattern 
an, the heaven-sent Guide to the Father’s house. 

| These aspects of his person and life are fundamental to 
| he biblical conception of his saving mission. ‘ He is one 
ho does for us what God alone can do. In him God 
wells, and through him God works as in and through no 
ler. | He is one 2 <whom the Father “ gave not the 
it by measure.’ \The divinity of Christ is presup- 































































298 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRID 


posed in the Christian view of his Saviourheod.| Chr 
is the human embodiment of God, the one in whom G 
uniquely comes to us; his is the face in which we beho 
the glory of God reflected; in him we see the Fathe 
Now, there are many to whom such a summary of t 
New Testament facts will seem quite inadequate 
we add the later metaphysical terms of ecclesiastical th 
ology and state of what “substances ” Christ is compos 
how two “natures” are conjoined in his person by 
‘*hypostatic union,” and affirm that as to his divine natu 
he was “ eternally begotten” of the Father’s essence. 
these assertions contribute anything to the significan 
value, or intelligibility of Christ’s person and work, 1] 
them by all means be employed. Many regard the 
however, as the survivals of extinct theological controye 
sies, directed chiefly against obsolete Gnostic speculatior 
and in no practical way longer serviceable to our app 
hension of Christ. Without questioning their usef 
in their time and with full recognition of the reli 
truths which the ancient Christological controversies ¢ 
served, it seems to me that we are adhering to what 
most characteristic in apostolic thought and, especial 
are keeping closest to Jesus’ own self-testimony, when } 
magnify the moral and religious significance of his pers 
and define to ourselves the uniqueness of Christ, not 
the cold and bloodless categories of metaphysics, but 
the terms in which he seems to have conceived and e 
pressed his own union with God in reciprocal knowled 
and mutual fellowship. That, at least, is what Christi 
faith can apprehend and apply, be its metaphysical ba 
ground what it may. 

It should be remembered that the ecclesiastical Chr 
tologies were wrought out when a dualistic philosop 
was prevalent, and were based upon its assumption 
Wholly divine or wholly human, was the current antitl 
sis. Hence the definitions of Christ’s person appear 
to describe a being composed of two disparate natur 
added together, or existing only in some kind of jux 
position or interaction. The divine and the human w 


' 


THE PERSONALITY OF THE SAVIOUR 299 





generically different. Hence, if Christ were defined as 
thoroughly, perfectly human, his divinity was thereby 
‘excluded. The more complete and perfect was his hu- 
| manity, the less room was left for any divinity. A more 
monistic philosophy has had its influence upon this, as 
Hupon all theological problems. If God and man are not 
different in kind, but lke in kind, then why should not 
|perfect humanity be the truest expression of divinity ? 
) Why should not the perfect human life of Christ be the 
‘completest translation which the Infinite can make of 
‘himself into the terms of our finiteness? The historic 
)facts are that the ancient Christologies were constructed 
according to the metaphysical theories then current, and 
‘that changed conceptions of the nature of God and man 
‘and their relations are introducing modified views of the 
yery idea and contents of the term, “the divinity of 
Christ.” Says Dr. Somerville: ‘“ We are not to find his 
(Christ’s) divinity in anything outside of his human life, 
‘but in the divine perfection of that human life itself, in 
the perfection of his love and holiness. He is more than 
‘man, he is divine; but his divinity, in so far as it is appre- 
hensible by us, is that of which human nature is capable, 
without which it is an imperfect and fragmentary thing, 
and infinitely less than what God made it to be—a 
‘divinity which he communicates to as many as receive 
him and in him become children of God.” ! 

The first Christians had a direct and immediate knowl- 
edge of Jesus’ saving power. So faras they formed theo- 
retic views of his person, they did so on the basis of their 
experience of his salvation. They did not deduce their 
conceptions of his power to save from theories of his per- 
‘son, but formed their estimates of his person in accord- 
ance with their knowledge and experience of his saving 
grace. The motives, therefore, which impelled them to 
define the person of their Lord were practical and reli- 
gious, rather than speculative. The apostles and their suc- 
cessors approached what we call the problem of Christ’s 
person, not from without but from within; in fellowship 










1 §t. Paul’s Conception of Christ, p. 48. 


300 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


with him, they had found God; how, then, were they 
think of him in whose face they had seen the Father ? 
They did not propose a theoretic solution of this pro 
lem in the sense in which modern speculative thoug 
attempts to solve metaphysical problems; they rath 
expressed their convictions concerning certain assum 
tions which the facts known to them — especially the fae 
of their own experience — seemed to require. They kne 
that Jesus Christ was a real man, but they were also su 
that God had dwelt and wrought in and through him 
a wholly exceptional manner. To the mind of the Chur 
of the first age God was in Christ as in no other; he w 
God manifest in the flesh, the reason, mind, and love: 
God revealed and interpreted in terms of human life ai 
experience. The first Christian thinkers searched the y 
cabulary of their age for terms in which to express the 
sense of the unique significance, the incomparable valu 
of Christ. They called him the image or impress of G 
(Col. i. 15; Heb. i. 3), the first-born or only begott 
Son of God (Col. i. 15; Jn. i. 18), the outshining of t 
divine majesty (Heb. i. 3), the Word, the self-expressic 
the uttered Reason of God (Jn. i. 1,14). They call 
him, after the manner of the sapiential books of Judais 
the eternal Wisdom of God through whose codéperati 
God formed the worlds (1 Cor. i. 24; Heb. i.2; Col.i. 1 
Jn. i. 3). By such terms as these which were the curre 
coin of the Jewish and Alexandrian thought-worlds 
the period, did the early Christian teachers express t 
results of their reflections and experiences in the school 
Christ. They believed that in some profound and mystet 
ous sense the roots of his being were in God; he was 
them, as he must ever be for Christian experience, # 
divine-human personality. He was at once the interp 
tation of God to man and of man to himself. In him t 
nature, will, and world-purpose of God stood revea 
He was the truth of God’s mind and feeling. In him m 
saw the Father. He was the self-expression — the tran 
lation of God into terms of humanity. 
The men who have left us these expressions of the 












q 


THE PERSONALITY OF THE SAVIOUR 301 
aith on the pages of the New Testament did not present 
hem as theoretic definitions of the interior mystery of 
Jeity or descriptions of the inner constitution of Christ’s 
erson. They were voicing a living religious conviction, 
xpressing in terms of their own age what Christ meant 
0 them. They were registering their own experience of 
is revealing, saving power. In the glorious mystery of 
is life and death they found all the treasures of spiritual 
on and knowledge, but they were “hidden” treas- 
res (Col. ii. 3), which could never become accessible, as 
Pascal says, to mere “curious intellect,” but only “to the 
yes of the heart and the eyes which see wisdom.” ? And, 
or myself, I believe that at the end of all our speculation, 
the summit of all our theological theorizing, we can do 
0 better than to adopt the language of the early Church 
nd to confess Christ as the Son of God, the revealed 
Vord, the brightness of God’s glory, and the express image 
fe person, the Power of God, and the Wisdom of God.? 
It is entirely accordant with the variety of forms in 
hich early Christianity expressed its estimates of Christ’s 
rson that later interpreters should have found his saving 
wer in different aspects of his life and work. The 
a is similar in the two cases and for the same rea- 
And, yet, there is one fundamental conception of 
et, and one fundamental conception of his salvation.) 
ut in order to find it one must go beneath the surface. 
mneither subject are all the New Testament teachings 
mally alike. The differences can be properly appreci- 
ed only by a historical and critical study of the various 
riters and their tendencies, and the underlying unities 
n be apprehended only by recourse to the common 
ound of faith and experience, in which all the early 
istian theologies have their roots. And, in the last 
ialysis, all goes back to the fact that the first disciples 
Jesus and their successors had found him to be what 
claimed to be —the Saviour, the way to the Father, 















1 Thoughts, XIX. 1. 
‘7 The two foregoing paragraphs are transferred, in substance, from 
eauthor’s book, The Teaching of Jesus. Macmillan, 1901, 



















302 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 


the Good Shepherd who spared not his life for his oy 
they had found him to be God’s true Son who alone k 
the Father, and who alone could bring men into 
liberty and peace of sonship to God. 

Speaking of the various ways in which Christian tea! 
have conceived of Christ and his salvation, Sabatier sa 
“ There is more than one way of connecting the Christ 
religion with the person and life of Christ. The apos 
Paul in his Epistles omits or ignores the entire life of 
Master, his miraculous birth, his miracles, his teaching, ¢ 
connects his gospel with a single fact, — the death of Chi 
upon the cross. On the other hand, Athanasius and 
Greek Church Fathers, inspired by St. John, concentr 
all their teaching upon the fact of the birth, or 
incarnation of the Word of God, who redeems, rene 
and saves human nature, by identifying himself with it 
so lifting it to the divine. Still farther, Socinians ¢ 
rationalists find with St. James the saving word and | 
essence of the gospel only in the moral teachings of Jes 
Evidently none of these theologians is absolutely wr 
but neither is any one of them exclusively right. 1 
doctrine of the cross, the doctrine of the Incarnate We 
the moral teachings of the parables, and the Sermon 
the Mount may all be traced back to a deeper princi 
of which these doctrines are so many different expressi 
‘The death of Jesus was the blow which broke the alabe 
box and set free the divine perfume of his heart, wh 
was renunciation, sacrifice, love. The doctrine of 
Word expresses that absolute union with God, that i 
manence of the Father in him, that sense of divine St 
ship, which was the basis of his religious conscious 
And what are his discourses, if not the preaching of # 
gospel of love and forgiveness which was the outeom 
his consciousness, and which made the salvation of sinn 
depend only upon repentance, trust, and the yielding 
of the heart? In the religious consciousness of Jes 
we find the initial divine fact, the creative fact, the s 
from which the tree has grown.” } 


1 The Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit, pp. 272, 2 


t 
i, 


THE PERSONALITY OF THE SAVIOUR 303 


The Christian doctrine of salvation, then, sees in Christ 
he One in whom the union of God with man is realized. 
le is the truest, the most real, the only perfect man. As 
he Head and Representative of our humanity, he is fitted 
) be the Saviour. But he is also the interpreter of God 
) us — the revealer of the divine will, nature and require- 
rents. He is thus able to show us what salvation is and 
)mediate to us the favor of God. He alone of all men 
erfectly knows what sin is and adequately realizes its 
vil, because his alone is the perfection in contrast with 
hich sin acquires its meaning and receives its condemna- 
mn. He can, therefore, both perfectly sympathize with 
mners and perfectly estimate and judge their sin. As the 
vealer and example of perfect love he unites pity with 
rity. The love of Jesus is like the white light which dis- 
oses the nature of evil and thereby condemns it. Sin is 
t most truly condemned by mere fury or by the infliction 
‘penalties; it is condemned by disclosure, by the revela- 
on of its real nature against the background of holiness. 
erfect love must repudiate and condemn its opposite, but 
us it accomplishes not by rage and hate, but by turning its 
savenly light upon the evil, thereby revealing its enormity. 
‘It was because the life of Jesus was the most perfect 
py and embodiment in humanity of the eternal life of 
od, that he illustrated at once the deepest compassion 
br sinners and the truest and most searching disclosure 
‘their sins. It is only in the light of his holy love that 
@ see our sins as they are in the eyes of God. There 
yver was any other “manifestation of God’s righteous- 
ess” and of sin’s nature in the light of it, which is com- 
rable to that which Jesus made in his life and death of 
‘ifering, sacrificial love. Nowhere was sin ever so re- 
valed, judged, and condemned as at the cross of Christ. 
|e never truly know what sin is until we know what 
lve is and cando. The death of Christ is the final seal 
ed consummate attestation of the divine love and there- 
ire the supreme disclosure and condemnation of sin. 
Od’s judgment upon sin is wrought by the holy and 
tying love which stoops to conquer it. 



























CHAPTER III 
























THE SIN FROM WHICH CHRIST SAVES 


In the teaching of Jesus sin is described as the loss 
the soul, or, according to the Revised Version, as tf 
forfeiture of the life (Mk. viii. 37). Again, the sim 
is said to “lose or forfeit his own self” (Lk. ix. 
Hence those who live in sin are described as “los 
—lost to the true meaning and ends of life. 1 
sinner is like a sheep that has wandered away from 1 
flock into the mountains—like a son who has banish 
himself from his home and his father. But Jesus spc 
of sin not so much in general as in concrete te 
The particular sins to which he referred most pointe 

were pride, hypocrisy, resentment, and unmercifulne 
Nothing was so sinful in his eyes as a selfish and 1 
licious heart; the worst sins to him were sins of ¢ 
position. The self-righteous Pharisee cloaking dee 
and selfishness under an ostentatious religiousness ; 
purse-proud miser gloating over his possessions ;_ 
pitiless priest and levite whose prejudice had consum 
their humanity; the merciless servant who, tho 
“much forgiven,” refused himself to forgive — th 
were the typical embodiments of sin in the view 
Jesus. All sin has its seat in the heart, that_is, i 
inner life, in a perversion and corruption of the y 
Sin is not primarily a matter of action, but_o charact 
Man is defiled by the evil thoughts and desires wh 
proceed from within. Hate is the source of murd 
Lust is the essence of adultery. If men are justified 
condemned by their words and deeds, it is because 
out of the inner treasury of thought and motive @ 
good and evil deeds alike proceed — because it is “ out 
the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaketh.” 

304 


NSD 


THE SIN FROM WHICH CHRIST SAVES 305 





In the Fourth Gospel the terms in which Jesus’ teach- 
jing concerning sin is construed are different, but their 
import is essentially the same. Here, too, the sinful 
world is lost in alienation from God; sin is moral dark- 
ness, or moral bondage. Christ came to save the world, 
to bring to it the heavenly light, to release the enslaved 
wills and hearts of men into the freedom which the 
truth gives. As man’s true life consists in sonship to 
God, that is, in moral kinship and likeness to him, so sin 
is described as a sonship to Satan (Jn. vii. 44), a radical 
inner perversion, a blindness in mind and heart to truth 
and to goodness. This is but a graphic description of 
(that perversion of the inner vision — the evil eye which 
: 





sees all things false ——the dim or broken lamp which 

aves “the whole body full of darkness” (Mt. vi. 22). 

Jesus made little or no reference to what we call the 
“problems ” of sin —its beginning, its relation to hered- 
ity, to physical death, or outward calamities. He held 
‘himself entirely aloof from the fruitless disputes on these 
‘subjects which were rife in the Jewish schools of his time 
and refused to be drawn into controversy concerning 
them. When asked whether those on whom the tower 
in Siloam fell were sinners above all others in Jerusalem, 
he replied in the negative, and added only a warning of 
the consequences of impenitence (Lk. xiii. 4). The 
Johannine tradition likewise reports him as repudiating 
‘the current view that congenital blindness was the pen- 
alty of some particular sin (Jn. ix. 2,3). To the first 
appearance of sin in the world he made no reference. His 
words contain no allusion to Adam or the Fall. He 
neyer intimates that men are guilty for the sins of their 
ancestors immediate or remote. He does not touch upon 
the disputed question whether or not physical death is 
the consequence of sin. There could be no better proof 
that no particular theory concerning these points is essen- 





1 There may be a remote allusion to the Fall-narrative in the refer- 
ence to Satan as being a ‘‘ murderer from the beginning’’ (Jn. viii. 44), 
but, in any case, it is brought into no relation to the question as to the 
origin of sin. 


306 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIX 


tial to Christian belief than is afforded by this silene 
Jesus. 
Our Lord spoke of sin as a fact of experience. | 
described it in its real character and effects. He neit 
exaggerated nor minimized its nature. He did not reg 
men — even the worst of them—as utterly sinful. 
could find at least a spark of goodness in the x 
depraved life. He knew nothing of such artificial | 
tinctions as that made by theologians between nati 
and spiritual goodness, according to which men may 
described as totally depraved religiously, however nur 
ous and great their civil virtues, such as uprightn 
generosity, and charity. On the other hand, none e 
estimated sin so seriously and truly. Sins were sc 
thing more to him than excusable mistakes or incide1 
lapses. He recognized the existence of sin, as well 
of sins. Individual sins have their root and source 
the depraved heart —in the sinful character. The t 
is known by its fruit. Sins are but the symptoms of 
disease. Sin is the ruination of the moral health; it is 
abnormal state of life; more specifically, it is disharme 
with God; it is essential unreason, absurdity ; it is, as 
biblical words for it indicate, a missing of the mark 
false aim —an effort to realize the good by the renune 
tion of the right and the true. : 
Jesus never defined sin abstractly, but always vier 
and pictured it in its actual manifestations. He exhibi 
its nature and heinousness by contrast with goodne 
Hence, as we have seen, he spoke more of the true I 
than of its loss or perversion. His primary emphasis y 
upon the good life which opens before every man. 
are to be saved from sin by recovery to goodness. 
only cure of error is truth; the only salvation from e 
is through the realization of righteousness. Sin is unlil 
ness_to God; salvation is likeness to him. Sin is | 
unfilial life, the life of self-banishment from the sot 
true home in God; salvation is found in return to t 
Father’s house and in the life of obedient sonship. Her 
Jesus summarized all goodness and all duty in love 



















eo THE SIN FROM WHICH CHRIST SAVES 307 
a! 
4 





xod, or in sonship to God. Be the sons of your Father 
heaven, he said to men; become like him in the motives 
nd spirit of your action; learn what God is and you will 
now what God requires; be his true children and all 
Ise will follow. The reason he gaye for not sinning was 
a it was unfilial: Cease from your hatreds, your cruelties, 
nd narrowness. Why? Because it is unlike God. Love 


¥ men, even your enemies; be generous and charitable. 





Vhy? In order that by so doing you may become the 
ue sons of God, may prove yourselves to be truly kin- 
red to him in thought and action, for he loves and blesses 
n even the unworthy and the unthankful. Godlikeness, 
hen, is the deep foundation of all goodness; to be like 
tod, —that is the reason for the good life on which all 
her reasons rest. By contrast, sin is the forfeiture of 
ne Godlike life and the curse of it is that it separates 
ian from God, gives him a wrong direction, and dooms 
im to moral failure. Jesus held up before men the con- 
aquences of their sin—the misery, the penalties, the 
ty Gehenna of remorse and shame —to these he pointed 
1solemn warning. But why do these consequences fol- 
»bwsin? Because of what sin 7s; because it is a perver- 
on of man’s true nature, a repudiation of his destiny as 
son of God. This is the Christian doctrine of sin; this 
the evil, the terrible and disastrous loss— the loss 
man’s true self — from which Jesus came to save him. 
When we turn to the writings of Paul the principal 
‘eculiarities which we note in his doctrine of sin are 
ese: (1) He is accustomed to personify sin and to 
seribe it as a world-ruling power. (2) He traces its 
2ginning back to Adam, conceives it as entering the 
orld in his transgression, and spreading itself thence 
on all mankind. (8) He regards physical death as due 
sin, and (4) he associates sin with the flesh in which he 
/pneeives moral evil as having its seat and sphere of mani- 
station.! All these characteristics of Paul’s thought are 






















j 1 For a historical and critical study of these peculiarities of the Paul- 
doctrine see Tennant, The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and 
iginal Sin, ch. xi. 


is 

































308 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRI 


capable of explanation, either by the peculiarities of 
mind or by the nature of his training. The personi 
tion of sin is, of course, a realistic rhetorical figure. 
enters the world and takes possession of men so 1 
as Paul expresses it, it is no longer they who go 
themselves, but the sin which has mastered them. 
proper ego, the better self, is suppressed and vanquis 
and sin rules the life. If the inner man, the law of 
reason, protests against this dominion, it is, neverthe 
powerless to break it. In vain does the enslaved 
yearn to be free; sin is master; it is no longer the 
himself who acts, but sin which dwells in him (Rom, 
7-25). In this picture of sin’s power we haye a t 
script of the apostle’s own pre-Christian experience y 
he was vainly seeking peace and victory over evil by d 
of obedience to the law. Psychologically speaking, 
a graphic portrayal of that evil bias or radical pervel 
of the will which constitutes the very essence of sin. — 
clash of opposing impulses in the soul is objectified 
seen as a conflict of the man himself with a power i 
ing his life from without. The bitter strife seems hl 
grapple with a personal foe. Carry the personificati 
step farther and you have the form of thought in which 
have always represented moral struggle, as a conflict ¥ 
personal enemy, a black demon or wily Satan, as in Buny 
description of the battle between Christian and Apoll 
Paul’s allusions to Adam and the Fall are purely 
dental. In writing of the resurrection he says: “A 
Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made al 
(1 Cor. xv. 22), and in his argument to show that 
grace of God in Christ is more than a match for the p 
of sin, he declares that as sin and death entered the ¥ 
by the transgression of Adam, so righteousness ant 
have come to men through the work of the second 4 
Jesus Christ (Rom. v. 12-19). He makes only this 
trative use of the Fall-narrative and does not indicate 
he conceives the relation of the first sin to all subseq 
transgressions. It cannot, therefore, be maintained 
any particular conjecture which we may make regal 


; 


THE SIN FROM WHICH CHRIST SAVES 809 


he nature of this relation is essential to Paul’s doctrine. 
Whether the sins of men in general be connected with the 
irst sin by realistic identification, constructive imputa- 
ion, heredity, or a figure of speech — each theory is power- 
ess to prove itself Pauline. Some speculations on this 
ubject are, indeed, less absurd than others; some are 
nore germane to Paul’s thought-world than others; but 
aul has offered us no theory of “ original sin.” ! 

That Paul should have conceived the beginning of sin 
mn a manner determined by the current Jewish under- 
tanding of the third chapter of Genesis was, of course, 
evitable. But this current interpretation of the Fall- 
s had considerably modified and elaborated the orig- 


al narrative. ‘The story in Genesis does not represent 
dam’s nature or moral condition as essentially changed 
y his disobedience. The consequences of his sin are 
irimarily physical — subjection to the ills of human life. 
There is no intimation that Adam’s sin was the source or 
saan of the sinfulness of his descendants; in fact, 
is idea is foreign to the whole Old Testament. The 
ter Jewish theory —of which Christian theology has 
iade such ample use — that by the first sin a root of evil 
as implanted in human nature, is not suggested in the 
all-story. Cain’s sin was due to his own choice alone; 
e guilt of it rested solely upon himself, and he was guilty 
0 no sin but his own. The sin of Adam and Eve is 
ewed in the ancient Hebrew legend as the first of an 
cending series—the fratricide of Cain, the intensified 
utality of Lamech, and the general corruption which 
easioned the flood. 
| It is a disputed point whether in Genesis Adam’s mor- 
lity is traced to his sin, and if so, in what sense. The 
yings: “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt 









uch it, lest ye die” (Gen. ii. 17; iii. 3), are commonly 


1T have advanced my own conjectures as to how Paul probably con- 
ived the relation in question in The Pauline Theology, ch. vi, and 
)serve that Mr. Tennant thinks them as feasible as any. Op. Ccit., 
. 2538-263. 









































310 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRI 


supposed to refer to physical death. On the other 
death did not ensue at once upon sin, as threatenec 
circumstance which might have suggested the com 
Jewish theory that death was not caused but hastens 
sin. Moreover, creaturely weakness seems to imply lia 
to death: “For out of the ground wast thou taken; 
dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen 
19). It is also to be remembered that Adam and Eye 
not yet eaten of the fruit of the tree of life which w 
confer exemption from death. This would seem to ii 
that they were naturally subject to it. In any eas 
view of the Old Testament as a whole is that dea 
natural to man. Violent or premature death may b 
wages of sin, but physical dissolution is assumed to b 
to creaturely limitations.1 Whatever view be take 
this point, however, it is quite clear that Paul assoe¢ 
with the first transgression two consequences: (1) th 
eral prevalence of sin in the world, and (2) the uniy 
reign of physical death. 

It may be well enough to mention here the p 
forms of late Jewish speculation concerning the origin 
dissemination of sin.2 One theory was built upor 
legend, in Gen. vi. 1-6, of the union of “the sor 
God,” or heavenly “ watchers,” as they were called, 
the daughters of men, from which union sprang a fra 
giants, who were tainted by the evil passions whiel 
occasioned their procreation. Another view referred 
introduction of sin to Adam and Eve, but regarded 
transgression as the source, to others, of physical r 
than of moral evils. By some the fact of physical ¢ 
by others the hastening of it, was ascribed to Adam’s 
later thought attributed mainly spiritual consequene 
his transgression. But the notion of a native evil ine 
tion, implanted in man by the Creator from the begini 
was also influential.2 How the apostle’s thought § 


1 So Charles, Tennant, Porter. 

2 For details, see Tennant, op. cit., passim. 

3 Cf. Professor F. C. Porter, ‘‘ The Yecger Hara, A Study of the ¢ 
Doctrine of Sin,’’ in the Yale Bicentennial Volume, Biblical and & 
Studies, p. 133. 


THE SIN FROM WHICH CHRIST SAVES 311 


related to these various speculations in detail we have no 
means of knowing, but we can confidently say that there 
is little in common between Paul’s doctrine of sin and late 
Jewish thought except in the two points named above. 

In these particulars, however, he has taken over certain 

Jewish beliefs popularly associated with the Fall-story in 

Genesis, rather than had direct recourse to the narrative 

itself. 

But these points have an antiquarian, rather than a 
practical, interest. They are never dwelt upon or elabo- 
rated by Paul; they do not affect the organism of his 

thought or determine the character of his doctrine of sal- 
_yation. For the most part he treats sin practically and 
experimentally. It is time to inquire what the essence of 
_his working theory is. This we can learn from his picture 
of the sinful world in the opening chapters of Romans. 
The principal forms or manifestations of sin which he 
there describes are as follows: a repression of the truth, 
a self-blinding, a refusal to follow the light which one has; 
a foolish pride and self-sufficiency, base ingratitude, and 
wilful indifference to the knowledge of God; corrupt and 
selfish passions, such as cruelty and hate, and, perhaps, 
worst of all, an assumed superiority and self-righteous 
contempt of others. Farther on in the same Epistle he 
associates sin with the flesh. Sin reigns in the body of 
the sinner and makes his members instruments of un- 
righteousness; it is a law in the members which wages 
war against the law of the reason; it creates a “ mind of 
the flesh” which engenders spiritual death, so that to 
“live after the flesh,” to be dominated by the sin which 
rules in the flesh, is to forfeit the life and liberty of son- 
| ship to God. 

It seems to some that Paul here adopts the theory that 
sin consists in sensuousness — that its essence is found in 
the carnal impulses. It was a common belief among 
Greek philosophers that matter was an evil principle, and 
that therefore the body had in it the seeds of sin. Some 
interpreters maintain that Paul had become acquainted 
with this theory, as held, for example, by Philo, and had 












312 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTR 

























appropriated it, so that he really offers two explanation 
of the origin of sin, the current Jewish explanation, whi 
referred it to Adam, and the Greek dualistic theory, whi 
found in the material body the principle of evil.t Th 
view is, I think, untenable, for the following reasons 
(1) Paul did not identify sin with the flesh or the bod: 
The flesh is a sphere of sin’s manifestation, but the fles 
and sin are never synonymous. (2) The body is capab 
of sanctification and even of glorification. Its membe 
may be, and should be made, instruments of righteousne: 
(3) Paul does not advocate asceticism, as he must ha’ 
done if he had regarded the body as essentially evil. 
flesh is, indeed, to be crucified, but by that is meant th 
it should be subordinated to the uses and requirements 
the spirit. While, therefore, the apostle closely associa’ 
sin with the flesh, and regards the impulses of the latt 
as furnishing a potent incentive to sin, he does not ple 
the seat of sin in the body or set forth his doctrine of 
flesh as furnishing an explanation of the origin of sin. 
What, then, is sin, according to Paul? Of course, 1 
look in vain for any formal definition. We must seal 
for his idea, underlying his various popular forms 
speech, as we searched for Jesus’ idea —by asking wh 
was his conception of goodness. Sin is the opposite 
goodness, righteousness, virtue. If we know what Pau 
conception of moral perfection was, we need be in 
doubt in respect to his view of the essence of sin. N 
for Paul the swnmum bonum is love; that is “the 
of surpassing excellence,” the most comprehensive 4 
fundamental heavenly gift, the virtue on which all oth 
virtues rest. He has told us what love is, and how 
acts. Patient, humble, generous, true, and hopeful, 
-never fails; it is the eternal, abiding substance of 
goodness. It is the greatest of virtues, because the m 
permanent and inclusive; it is the essence of moral p 
fection; its completion would be the realization of & 
which is perfect.” What is this but the doctrine of Je 


1 Of. my Theology of the New Testament, p. 338 sq., and the refer el 
there given, 








THE SIN FROM WHICH CHRIST SAVES 313 


that love is of God, nay, that God is love, and that he that 
loveth is born of God and knoweth God, — that to love 
one’s brethren is to walk in the light, —that the burden 
of Jesus’ message is the commandment of love, and that 
the goal of all Christian aspiration and effort is that the 
love of God should be perfected in us? And what are 
these teachings of Paul and John alike but versions of 
the sayings of Jesus that love is the substance of all laws 
and commandments, and that the Christian ideal is to be 
perfect in love as God in heaven is perfect? 

Now define the opposite of this love which is “the 
fulfilling of the law,” and you have the Christian idea of 
sin. There may be a reasonable difference of opinion as 
to what single word would best express this contrast to 
love. Most present-day theologians have agreed upon the 
word “selfishness,” comprehensively understood, as in- 
eluding all forms of self-will, self-righteousness, and self- 
glorification. My own opinion is that in his profound 
analysis of sin Julius Miiller has convincingly shown 
that every form of sin has its root in selfishness, and Paul 
suggests this view when he says that Christ died to save 
men in order that they might no longer live unto them- 
selves (2 Cor. v.15). But whatever may be thought of 
the word “ selfishness ” as best expressing the nature of sin, 
there can be no doubt that it is the equally explicit teach- 
ing of Christ, of Paul, and of John that sin is lovelessness ; 
it is the opposite, the contrary of love. Here is Paul’s 
most graphic, concrete description of goodness: “ Love 
suffereth long, and is kind ; love envieth not ; love vaunt- 
eth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself 
unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh not 
account of evil; rejoiceth not in unrighteousness, but 
rejoiceth with the truth ; beareth all things, believeth all 
things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” ! Reverse 
this picture and you would have the description of 


1 The Twentieth Century New Testament renders these phrases : ‘‘ She 
‘is proof against all things, always trustful, always hopeful, always 
patient.””» Dr. Weymouth translates: ‘‘She knows how to be silent ; 
she is full of trust, full of hope, full of patient endurance.”’ 


‘ 
. 


e 


\a 




























314 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


sin, —harshness, envy, pride, self-seeking, and, perhaps, 
worst of all, the loss of aspiration for truth and goodness. 
Place in contrast with the above passage Rom. i. 29-31, 
beginning, “unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, 
maliciousness, envy,” etc. Or, place side by side the 
descriptions of the “fruit of the Spirit” and the “works 
of the flesh” in Gal. v. 19-23,— on the one side, * love, 
joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness,” etc. ; on the other, 
“ uncleanness, enmities, jealousies, envyings,” ete. What- 
ever views Paul may have had of the origin of sin, these 
contrasted passages show clearly what was his conception 
of its actual character and manifestations. 

It is apparent from what has been said that, in his prae- 
tical use of the doctrine of sin, Paul made no application 
of the connection of later sins with that of Adam. What- 
ever views he may have entertained on that point, — and 
precisely what they were has never been determined, — 
they are purely incidental and form no essential part of 
his conception of sin’s nature, much less of the specifically 
Christian conception in general. In whatever sense 
the apostle conceived of all men as being “constituted 
sinners ” by Adam’s trespass, he does not describe them 
as being from birth and by nature guilty sinners an 
objects of God’s wrath. Formerly this idea was de 
duced from the phrase: “And we (Jews) were by 
nature children of wrath, even as the rest” (Gentiles) 
(Eph. ii. 3); but this was done under stress of dogmatic 
necessity and in defiance both of the context and of Paul’s 
general teaching concerning the natural relation of the 
Jewish people to God. The interpretation in question 
has been so amply and repeatedly refuted that it is not 
necessary to dwell upon the passage here. The meaning 
is that the Jews have by their evil manner of life, in the 
course of their sinful moral development (dvcer), made 
themselves the objects of God’s wrath, as really as the 
Gentiles are.!_ The people of God, the natural branches 


1 So, e.g., Meyer, Weiss, von Soden, T. K. Abbott, and Tennant, in 
loco. A summary of the argument for this interpretation may be found in 
my Pauline Theology, pp. 152-157, or in my Theology of the New Teste 


THE SIN FROM WHICH CHRIST SAVES 315 































he sacred olive tree, who should have been’ the 
loved” of God (Rom. xi. 28), have become “sons of 
isobedience ” and so “children of wrath.” 4 — 
The apostle certainly took a most serious view of sin, 
heinousness, guilt, universality, and terrible conse- 
ences; yet he did not describe men as utterly destitute 


Egoodness. Even the depraved heathen not only had a 
ww of God written on their hearts to whose meaning and 
authority they were not totally blind; but, in some cases 
least, more or less fully obeyed its requirements 


pacity for a more enlightened piety. There is no rea- 
n to doubt that Paul could have subscribed the modern, 
‘itigated definition of “total depravity,” which explains 
: “extensively as meaning that sin pervades, affects, and cor- 
| pts the total man, all his powers and faculties. But 
ie genuine, historic doctrine of intensive total depravity, 
taught, for example, by Augustine and Edwards, and 
bodied in the Westminster Catechism,’ is an exaggera- 


t, pp. 859, 860. Dr. Armitage Robinson understands ¢vce to mean, 
they are ‘‘in themselves,” i.e., apart from divine aid. His interpreta- 
m comes to the same practical aul as that mentioned above. 
tit has often been assumed because Paul here uses the word ‘‘ chil- 
” (réxva épyijs), that he is speaking of the sinfulness of young 
ildren or infants. Of course this idea is utterly baseless. By ‘chil- 
(en of wrath’? is meant, according to a common Hebraistic idiom, 
jects gr recipients of wrath. Compare the phrase ‘‘children of the 
mise " (Rom. ix. 8), that is to say, those on whom the promise is 


Acts xvii. 22: ‘*Men of Athens, I perceive that you are in every 
ij remarkably religious’? (Weymouth); ‘‘On every hand I see 
of your being very religious’’ (Twentieth Century New Testament). 
. VY. in rendering ‘‘somewhat superstitious’’ only partially cor- 
the mistranslation of the A. V. ‘too superstitious.”’ The Am. 
_ has set the matter right, ‘‘ very religious.”’ 
|| ?Q. 25. ‘*The sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell, consisteth 
the guilt of Adam’s first sin, the want of that righteousness wherein 
|) was created, and. the corruption of his nature, whereby he is utterly 
posed, disabled, and made opposite unto all that is spiritually good, 
wholly inclined unto all evil, and that continually ; which is com- 
ly called original sin, and from which do proceed all actual trans- 




















316 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRI 






























tion even of Paul’s strenuous doctrine. It is a fair ¢ 
tion whether this form of the doctrine does not logic 
exclude from man all capacity for redemption. 
natural man is wholly inclined to all evil, and that in 
santly; if there isin him nothing but moral corrupt 
no good at all, it is difficult to see why he is not in 
case as bad as he can be, and, if so, what is there in } 
to which the divine love can appeal? He is then, it wou! 
seem, absolutely dead in trespasses and sins — as incap 
of response to the grace of God as a corpse is irresponsiy 
to the touch. The doctrine was often consistently | 
ried out to this result in the old Protestant theology, 
regeneration described as a purely dynamic, galvani¢ 
of God of which man is a merely passive recipient. | 
such a view of human nature is as unwarranted by Pa 
teaching as it is opposite to the nature and message 
the gospel. Christ’s appeal to all men everywhere 
repent is made in good faith. Paul always assumes 
presence of a capacity in man to heed and respond to 
. gospel invitation. It may be added that the metho¢ 
saving the old doctrine of total depravity by holding 
there are two wholly different kinds of goodness, — 
desperate expedient. It is based on a false, abst 
dualism. If there are two kinds of goodness, then th 
must be two corresponding kinds of sin. If natural 
civil righteousness has no excellence and meets no f 
in God’s eyes, then the absence or violation of it can 
concern or displease him. On this view the whole 7 
ural, social, and civil life of man is a kind of new 
sphere with whose duties and relations God is not ¢ 
cerned. It is only in a field of experience and action t 
nically called religious that the terms “ good” and “e 
really apply. That Paul thought otherwise is evict 
from his comments on “ civil righteousness ” in Rom. 
The reductio ad absurdum of this doctrine is found 


gressions.’’ Edwards: ‘‘Men are totally corrupt in all their fact 
and all the principles of their nature ; all their senses are only inlets 
outlets of sin, channels of corruption. There is nothing but sin, no 
at all.” Sermon on ‘‘ The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinn 


¥ 


THE SIN FROM WHICH CHRIST SAVES 317 


the sentiment that the virtues of the heathen sages were 
really but splendid vices, and that the same actions which 


in a Christian are good, can only be evil in a non-Chris- 






tian.t It is hardly necessary to say that such distinctions 
are the makeshifts of a desperate dogmatism and are as 
‘un-Pauline as they are unphilosophical. 

| Concerning the Christian doctrine of sin, then, we may 
say, negatively: (1) It offers no explanation of sin’s 
origin or of the mysterious relation of heredity to the 
‘moral life of man. It does not, of course, follow that 
‘these are not proper and important subjects of study. 
| But no particular speculation concerning them is entitled 
to be called a Christian doctrine. The realistic theory 
elaborated by Augustine has had the widest vogue and 
is commonly ranked as the orthodox view. According to 
this conception all men sinned in Adam because all were 
‘seminally present in him; he was the summary of the 
race which had not yet begun to be individualized. But 
this — besides resting on a literal interpretation of the 
-Genesis-narrative — is only an application of neo-Platonic 
philosophy which can hardly lay claim to be an authorita- 
tive source of Christian teaching. If Paul in Rom. v. 12 
meant to say that we sinned in Adam, it must have been 
in the sense in which the writer of Hebrews declares that 
Leyi paid tithes in his great-grandfather, Abraham — 
— “so to speak” (Heb. vii. 9). It was not strange that 
a conservative school of seventeenth-century Calvinists 
repudiated this explanation as heathen in its origin and 
irrational in itself. No man, they said, can sin in his 
ancestors. But what, then, did Paul mean? The an- 
Swer, said the Federal theologians, is found a few verses 
farther on, where the apostle says that “ through one 
man’s disobedience the many were made (or constituted) 
sinners.” They did not actually sin when Adam sinned, 
but when he fell, God, by a sovereign dispensation, con- 
stituted them sinners; that is, proceeded to regard and 











1 The virtues of the heathen moralists are declared by Augustine to be 
only apparent and counterfeit virtues, and ‘‘to be reckoned as vices 
rather than virtues.’? City of God, XIX. 25. 


* 


+ 


318 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


treat them as such. But how can God regard, condem 
and punish as sinners those who have not actually, that | 
really, sinned at all? Answer: He made a covenai 
with Adam that he should stand forth as the representa 
tive of the race. Mankind should stand or fall with hin 
If he succumbed to temptation, then all his descendan 
were to be dealt with as if they had committed his siz 
that is, were to become the objects of God’s wrath and to b 
exposed to the doom of eternal death. If one asks: Hoy 
is this fair or just? How can men be condemned for tk 
sin of a representative in whose choice they had no pa 
Answer, Who art thou that repliest against God? 

Such are the historic, orthodox theories of original sir 
Each contradicts the other, and both claim to be Paulin 
I venture the opinion, however, that Paul’s thought h: 
nothing in common with neo-Platonic realism, much le 
with that series of covenants (mostly made in Holland 
by which one school of seventeenth-century Calvinis' 
explained God’s dealings with the human race. It © 
high time that the problem of the origin of sin should b 
withdrawn from the field of exegesis and theologies 
speculation and remanded to the realm to which 
belongs —the scientific investigation of heredity and 
moral evolution. 

(2) The Christian conception of sin is not that 
consists In sensuousness or animalism— an ancient an 
widespread theory, indeed, but one which, if it has an 
philosophical foundation at all, must rest at last on a met 
aphysical dualism which views matter’as essentially evi 
and is, as Mr. Tennant says, one of the “most perenn 
and ineradicable of all popular heresies.” Nevertheles 
it is true that the sensuous impulses are among the mos 
potent incentives to sin, and it may be true that sin bega 
in a failure to control and “moralize” them. This aj 
pears to have been the most prevalent Jewish view, an 
in the judgment of some scholars was the original impot 


1 Such a mode of treatment is illustrated by Tennant, The Origin ¢ 
Propagation of Sin; Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie, TI. 363-399; 
Morris, A New Natural Theology, pp. 275-291. ; 

































THE SIN FROM WHICH CHRIST SAVES 319 


ae Fall-story which we now read, in a comparatively. 
lernized form, in Gen. iii. 

We may say positively: (1) that the Christian view of 
Bei: on the assumption that it is a voluntary affair. 
t only does it have its seat in the will; it is a state of 
will. It is not merely a series of voluntary acts ; it 
si ists rather in the fixed moral preferences ; 3 ibasea 
acter. Hence sin is not merely error, or weakness, or 
ural imperfection ; it is moral perversity, a false direc- 
. It follows that sin cannot be merely negative —a 
*e absence of good. Sin is as positive as goodness. It 
an act, a choice, a moral condition. It is a self-affir- 
ion, albeit a false affirmation. 

ut these are formal statements. We may add (2) 
t sin is discord with God, disharmony with his will and 
sure, and so an offence against man’s own well-being. 
/ may be defined as transgression of God’s law, but his 
ww” is not a statutory system. God’s law is a name 
those demands upon mankind which arise out of his 
«ure and out of the nature of man’s relation to him. 

3) It follows, of course, that sin is blameworthy. 
t, in various degrees, attaches to all sin. Moreover, 
é sin is a character, every man’s sin is his own. This 
_ been denied only by resolving sin into a pale abstrac- 
1. When sin is viewed ethically and experimentally, 
s self-evident that every man’s acts, choices, and char- 
erare his own and not another’s. He could not inherit 
if 
hm, much less could he perform or acquire them before 
eexisted, and even less still could God reckon them to 
in advance in sheer arbitrariness. The newly born 
% is not guilty, nor is it the object of God’s wrath. 
‘man eyer sinned in his ancestors, or in any one of 
hm, whether immediate or remote. A far better argu- 


hit 
7 


y, he is much more likely to be responsible for the 
ences of his own sin than I am. No man with 


320 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRI 


Adam’s sin, and I have never heard of any theol 
even if lacking in that important qualification for his 
ing, who was ever known to confess his part in wh 
had, perhaps, demonstrated in his book to be his 
chief, most damning and soul-destroying sin. 

(4) Sin is the negation, the opposite, of love. — 
the repudiation of the requirements of love; it is sé 
ness. It is the life of self-banishment from the Fat 
love and fellowship. This is the specifically Chri 
conception of sin. To live the life of sin is, accordit 
the Johannine definition, to walk in the darkness, in 
of in God’s light, and his light is his love. Or, ii 
speak the language of Paul, sin is the renunciation 0} 
duties and obligations of love, which is the crown ¢ 
virtues, the bond of perfectness, the fulfilling of the 
This is but saying in other, but equivalent, words 
our Lord teaches. If love is the sum and substance 
laws and commandments, then lovelessness is the es 
of sin. 

One question remains, What would constitute s 
tion from sin thus defined? When sin is viewed 4 
accumulation of back debts, we very naturally spe 
some provision for their cancellation. If our sinful 
acters are best described as a kind of old score, the 
need some bookkeeping analogy to show how our ace 
may be balanced or our indebtedness expunged. Or 
is best described as a breach of the Sovereign’s co 
honor, a supreme personal insult, then, of course, saly 
must be provided for by some reparation. Or if, 
sin is to be described as a crime, an offence agains 
divine legislation, then the analogy would suggest 
the first requisite is the infliction of the statutory pet 
Or, once more, if sin is something quantitatively infin 
then the notion of a quantitative satisfaction for it 
near to hand. But if these are only figures of speech, 
some of them rather infelicitous and misleading figures 
that, then the descriptions of salvation which are bas 
upon them will seem the more inappropriate and unsat 
factory. If sin is a moral state, a character, what ¢ 















THE SIN FROM WHICH CHRIST SAVES $21 








rom it but a change of life, and what means and 
s are adapted to that end except those which help 
a new character? How can sin be overcome except 
y being replaced? How can plans, schemes, balances, or 

n forgiveness, serve really to save us to our true life 
destiny as sons of God except so far as they bring us 
mony with him and into loyalty to his truth? 
m is not primarily a legal status, but a moral rela- 


. ip. This is the work for which Christ came, lived, 
d, suffered, and died. 


ee rrr rer 


CHAPTER IV 
THE NATURE AND ENDS OF PUNISHMENT 


THERE are almost as many theories of punishmel 
there are theories of atonement. Anselm, as we have 
regarded punishment as the avenging of a private ¥ 
Grotius as a testimony to God’s displeasure at sin 
penal satisfactionists as pain inflicted in vindicatic 
justice, while many modern writers would define | 

«paternal discipline or chastisement. There are e 
varying conceptions of the necessity and object of pu 
ment. For Anselm it was necessary in order to 1 
reparation for an insult and so to vindicate the d 
dignity ; for Grotius its object was to impress upon € 
creatures the majesty of his law and so to deter them 
further offences ; in the old Protestant theology pt 
ment was regarded as an end in itself; it is infl 
simply because it is deserved and, therefore, mus 
inflicted; modern “ benevolencism ”1 regards it 
factor in God’s administration of the world, and se 
it a means to an end beyond itself, the reformation 0 
covery of its object to a better life. 















* I owe this term to Professor Warfield, who uses it to design: te 
he calls ‘‘the prevailing gospel of the indiscriminate love of God 
gospel whose prevalence he deeply deplores. Elsewhere in explar 
of the word ‘‘indiscriminate’’ he adds the term “ undiscrimin 
and characterizes the ‘‘ gospel ” in question as the doctrine that “«€ 
love and nothing but love.” ‘Certainly such a God,” declare 
Warfield, ‘‘ cannot need propitiating,’’ and in the idea of a Go 
does not need to be appeased by penal suffering he finds the f 
source of theological error. Princeton Theological Review, Jan 
1903, pp. 89, 90. The implication, however, that those who do ne 
lieve in a God who ‘‘ needs propitiating,”’ do therefore believe in E 
who is mere genial good nature and who is indifferent to sin, is not 
out by any view or theory which I have met with in a somewhat exte 
reading of the modern literature of the subject. 

322 


f 


THE NATURE AND ENDS OF PUNISHMENT 323 


' These theories of punishment are so interwoven with 
the problems respecting the nature and method of salva- 
‘tion that it seems necessary, at this stage, to review them 
somewhat in detail. It is obvious that the problem as to 
the nature of penalty is primary for that conception of 
‘atonement which holds that the death of Christ was a 
strict equivalent to the penalty of sin and was designed 
to obtain, by another method, the same end which the 
infliction of penalty would have secured. On this view 
atonement can only be defined in the light of what penalty 
is. Define the nature and end of punishment and you 
‘have defined the necessity and object of Christ’s death. 
‘If the theory is one of precise equivalence in quantity 
or significance between atonement and penalty, then the 
principle which we have just stated holds without quali- 
fication. But in proportion as the death of Christ is held 
‘to be penal in some indefinite sense, and the equivalence 
— his sufferings and the deserts of sin is no longer 
‘an equivalence in amount, kind, or character, but per 
‘acceptationem, in that proportion will the definition of 
punishment cease to be the guiding light by which the 
work of salvation is interpreted. We can best illustrate 
the different phases of doctrine to which we refer by con- 
sidering first the theory of punishment as designed solely 
to vindicate and satisfy retributive justice. 

According to the theory in question punishment is 
“pain inflicted because of guilt” in order to satisfy justice 
—‘“pain or loss which is directly or indirectly inflicted by 
the Law-giver, in vindication of his justice outraged by the 
violation of law.”1! Dr. Shedd gives as an illustration of 
this conception of punishment the maxim: “ An eye for 
an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” which, he says, our Lord 
approved and sanctioned. All that he objected to, de- 
clares Dr. Shedd, was the enforcement of the principle 
by the individual, who exceeds his rights when he under- 
takes the work of retribution. But society or the state, 
which is ordained by God, may with perfect propriety 













-1$Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, Il. 422; Strong, Systematic Theology, 
P. 350. So Hodge, Dale, and many others. 



























324 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DO 


adopt and apply the maxim in question; much more is 
in the opinion of this theologian, perfectly accordant y 
the Christian conception of God that he should make it 
principle of his administration. If, then, Christ enthroi 
the lex talionis by “placing its execution upon the pre 
basis,” and if it is “ dispassionate and right ” for the g 
ernment (and much more for God himself whose author 
lies behind the government) to “put out the eye of 
who has put out an eye,” two questions arise: (1) 
does not God act on this supremely just principle si 
“justice must be exercised always and everywhere”? at 
(2) Is it not positively wrong for him (on the assumpti 
of a theology like Dr. Shedd’s) thus to fail to do wha 
“right”? Itis characteristic of the purely a priori tre 
ment of the subject of penalty illustrated by writers | 
Dr. Shedd, that questions of this sort are not conside: 
The exposition continues: Punishment has but one : 
the satisfaction of justice; it is not intended or expec 
to do the person punished any good. Indeed, it is i 
ceivable that it should have this result, since suffer 
which benefits the sufferer is, ¢pso facto, only chastiseme 
and not punishment. Punishment is for its own sake; 
it “the criminal is sacrificed to justice.” Now two thi 
are essential to the idea of penalty: it must be equiva 
to the offence, and it must be intended and felt as 
tributive. <A fine for a murder would not be just; an 
for a tooth would not be fair. The same suffering m 
be penal to one man and disciplinary to another; if if 
intended to be penal and is felt to be penal, then 
penal; otherwise, it is not penal. Physical death i 
penalty for sin to the wicked man and a chastisement 
the good man.? 
Dr. Strong has elaborated the same theory, but with 
of logical stringency and consistency. “ Punishment,” 
says, “is essentially different from chastisement; 
latter proceeds from love; punishment proceeds not fr 
love, but from justice.” Accordingly we are told t 
“penalty is not essentially reformatory,” nor is it “ess 


1 Op. cit., II. 422-424, 











THE NATURE AND ENDS OF PUNISHMENT By 


ally deterrent and preventive.” Chastisement is the 
‘rod of God’s mercy”; penalty is the “rod of his anger 
.” Now when these statements are placed side 
sy side, they form a curious specimen of reasoning. First 
re are told that punishment is “essentially different” 
tom chastisement, that is, that it is essentially non-re- 
‘ormatory and non-deterrent, and then we are told that it 
s not essentially reformatory or deterrent, — such is not its 
‘primary design,” — but it is admitted that it may inci- 
lentally have that design and effect,! that is: (1) A is 
ssentially different from B. But (2) though A is not 
ey the same as B, yet “incidentally ” A may have 
ome of the qualities and effects of B. I am not sure 
nder which rubric the professional logicians classify this 
aeeular form of the syllogism. However, I will at 
»resent waive the right — which one might exercise — to 
aise any formal objections against these definitions and 
vill content myself with pointing out the psychological 
veculiarity of this description of God’s nature and method. 
Ve have to remember that this theology defines love and 
ustice as entirely separate and independent attributes and 
owers. God’s moral nature is composed of these two dis- 
arate factors. Each of these potencies functions by itself. 
ustice enacts punishment, and love practises discipline 
chastisement. On sinners justice plies the “rod of 
xod’s anger and fury,” while on the saints love lays the 
hastening “rod of his mercy and goodness.” In deal- 
g with sin and sinners, then, God is all. justice, ven- 
eance, and punishment. The consequences of their sin 
hich he “inflicts ” are not intended to do them any good ; 
t if, nevertheless, they should “incidentally” have 
ome beneficial effect, that would simply prove that the 
unishment was not quo ad hoc punishment after all. Ad- 









1“These ends (of moral betterment and prevention) may be inci- 
mtally secured through its infliction, but the great end of penalty is the 
ndication of the character of the Law-giver.’? Op. cit., p. 351. Minor 
subordinate ends of punishment may therefore be the reformation of 
€ sinner and the prevention of sin in others, and yet the idea of pun- 
ment is defined as excluding these conceptions; it is said to be of 
essentially different kind from a reformatory or preventive process. 


OO 


326 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DO 






















vocates of the theory, while admitting, in defiance of 
definitions, the hypothetical possibility of such a re 
would clearly regard its actual occurrence (if it bet 
known) as surprising, if not positively disappoint 
But the only point which I would now urge upon 
reader’s attention is this: Do not fail to note the con 
tion of God which lies behind this exposition. His 1 
relation to sin and sinners is exhausted by the coneep 
of retributive justice. He deals with sin only with 
rod of his fury. ‘‘ Justice is independent of love in 
and superior to it” —let not that master light of al 
seeing in this field be lost from view. In visiting 1 
sin its consequences God has no concern or intention | 
ing to the advantage of the sinner; he is bent solelyt 
getting even with him. His motto is, “An eye fo 
eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” 

Dr. Dale’s argument for the same general theory 
this effect: (1) Punishment cannot be “a reforma 
process,” because if it were “that and nothing m¢ 
“the severity of punishment would have to be meast 
not by the magnitude of the sin for which it is infli 
but by the difficulty of inducing the sinner to ame 
(2) The sinner “must deserve to be punished, or the 
has no right to punish him.” (3) Nor is the prit 
design of penalty to deter others from sin or @1 
though it may have that effect. Punishment, the 
“pain and loss inflicted for the violation of I: 
We naturally ask here several questions: Are all 
sible reformatory results to be denied to punishm 
If so, must God punish all sin? Must punitive ju 
as Drs. Shedd and Strong assert, be exercised e 
where? And, if so, how then can God forgive at 
Dr. Dale appears to take the same view upon the 
point as the authors previously quoted. “ Punishm 
he says, “inflicted upon a man to make him better ii 
future is not punishment, but discipline; to be pt 
ment, it must be inflicted for evil deeds done in 
past.”2 And yet, this is not quite equivalent to sé 


1 Atonement, pp. 873-383. 2 Op. cit., p. 383. 


: : THE NATURE AND ENDS OF PUNISHMENT 327 


that punishment and discipline are “ essentially different,” 
and that punishment must therefore be purely vindicative 
and can have no incidental or secondary disciplinary 
intention or effect. Elsewhere Dr. Dale seeks to show 
that the theory is “utterly rotten” which grounds 
punishment solely upon expediency, and regards it as 
reformatory “and nothing more.” His argument is that 
‘punishment is not grounded on utility, but I cannot dis- 
cover that he anywhere quite denies that it may, never- 
theless, prove morally useful to those who are punished. 
Iam the more inclined to think that he does consciously 
admit this possibility from his explicit assertion that 
punishment may have the effect “to diminish crime.” 
He affirms that the punishment of crime does “benefit 
the public.”! Well then, can it be proven that it might 
not benefit the person punished? Is not he a part of “the 
public”? And if punishment may have a deterrent value, 
how can it be proven that it was not designed to have it? 
True, Dr. Dale affirms that suffering inflicted with the 
design of reforming or improving the sinner is discipline 
and not punishment. That statement makes the differ- 
ence between punishment and discipline to hinge upon 
the intention lying in the mind of the Lawgiver and 
leaves open the possibility, at least, that the suffering 
which is intended to vindicate law may in fact also do the 
people punished some good. I cannot see that Dr. Dale 
has shut out this possibility by any of his definitions. 
Now assuming that he does admit this possibility (as Dr. 
Strong explicitly does, in spite of his previous assertions), 
then you have this curious situation: God designs the 
consequences of sin solely for vindicatory purposes, but, 
incidentally and subordinately, they may have, and, pre- 
| sumably, sometimes do have, a beneficial moral effect on 
| the punished, though this is per accidens and lies outside 
the divine intention. Or, in other words, in so far 
as the consequences of sin are merely retributive, they 
| are penal, and in so far as they are reformatory or use- 
fl, they are disciplinary, and the degree in which they 


1 Op. cit., p. 377. 









328 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 








are the one or the other depends upon the subjecti 
intentions of the Lawgiver in ordaining these cons 
quences. That amounts to this: We have two wor 
“punishment” and “discipline,” by which we deseri 
the results of sin; we have formally and abstractly « 
fined and distinguished them, but as the ground of t 
distinction lies in the divine intention and not in ¢ 
known or knowable effect, we can never tell, in poin 
fact, which is which. The distinction is available for : 
purpose except that of formal, abstract reasoning. If, 
the other hand, we had been plainly told that punishme 
is so essentially different from chastisement that, in | 
case, could it have any of its qualities or effects, then 
would have been, so far, clear. And possibly, this 2s 
position which Dr. Dale intends to take up; if so, it 
not consistently maintained nor are its logical con 
quences developed. 

Our next question, whether the “eternal law of rig 
eousness” must assert itself in vindicatory punishme 
Dr. Dale weighs and balances for a long time before 
answers it. ‘Is it then inevitable that God should inf 
the penalties which sin has deserved? Has he no choie 
Is it impossible that he should be merciful? Does he 
as a blind, unconscious force? Is the government of f 
universe a vast and awful mechanism,” ete.? One s 
from the parallelism here that Dr. Dale considers it sé 
evident that when you say: God has no choice ; he m 
unconditionally punish all sin, — you are virtually say 
that God cannot be merciful and that he does act a 
blind, unconscious force. We can know in advan 
therefore, how he must answer his own questions. J 
can already see that his absolute theory of punishm 
(assuming that he started out to hold it uncompron 
ingly) is beginning to break down. He qualified it 
admitting the deterrent intention and effect of pena 
and left a loop-hole by which even the disciplinary ¢ 
ment might enter. He frankly adopted one Grotian 
element in his description of penalty; it speedily leavens 
the whole lump. Hence he answers: It is not necess 





THE NATURE AND ENDS OF PUNISHMENT 329 


that God should punish. True, sin deserves to be 
punished, but God is not compelled to treat sinners in 
strict accordance with their deserts. He may be, and, in 
ooint of fact, is, gracious. What, then, must he do? 
Can he forgive unconditionally ? No; he must assert the 
orinciple that sin deserves to be punished in some other way 
chan by uaishin it!; by “some other act of at least 
squal intensity,” he must express the ill desert of sin. 
IPhis he does in the sufferings and death of Christ. 
Notice that the death of Christ is here described, not as 
junishment, but as a substitute for punishment —an 
‘assertion” of the principle that sin deserves to be 
yunished. In this connection there is not a word about 
fee, sufferings being “penal.” Indeed to assert that 
hey were so, would be to answer the questions just cited 
\ffirmatively, that is, to say that God must punish, has no 
jhoice, acts as a blind, unconscious force, etc. The theory 
hat i issues from these considerations is the governmental 
heory pure and simple. Christ’s sufferings are not penal, 
put are as effective an assertion of the majesty of the law 
§ punishment would be. Though starting at the same 
pot as Drs. Shedd and Strong in his “shal ogonler of 
| fae Dr. Dale issues in a widely different result. 
de admits into his conception of punishment elements 
vhich make it impossible for him, despite his best en- 
eavors, to reach the penal theory of atonement on that 
ath. I have previously pointed out that Dr. Strong was 
ot quite uncompromising enough in his definitions of 
junishment for the good of his theory of penal satisfac- 
ion, but, nevertheless, he overleaped the obstacles created 
y his own logic and succeeded in reaching the goal which 
dr. Dale could not achieve. It is only fair to say, how- 
ver, that what Dr. Dale was prevented from doing by his 
hilosophy of penalty he succeeded in accomplishing by 
ther means. In the next chapter, where he approaches 
e subject from another angle, this.author adopts the 
enal theory in toto. Here Christ’s death is no longer 
mere acknowledgment or assertion of the desert of sin, 


1 Op. cit., p. 391. 
















-But this is by the way. 


330 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


but an actual endurance of penalty: “Christ did 1 
merely acknowledge that we deserved to suffer. 
endured the penalties of sin, and so made an actual st 
mission to the authority and righteousness of the prin 
which those penalties express.” ‘On the cross he submitt 
to the actual penalty of sin.”1 But this is not all. 
where Dr. Dale also adopts Mr. Maurice’s theory 
Christ’s representative headship, which differs as wide 
from both the other theories as they do from one anoth 
There is, perhaps, a certain advantage in holding seye 
different theories all at once; one may suppose that 
truth is the more likely to lie somewhere among the 













On the general philosophy of punishment which I he 
thus sketched I would offer the following suggestions 
comments: (1) Is there not something inadequate a 
even misleading in the conception of a divine “ infliction 
of penalty, as if it were of the nature of a laying on 
stripes? The customary definition has a strong suggesti 
of human corporal punishment. 

(2) The theory in question proceeds as if God’s 
were a kind of statutory system, an authority above G 
himself, with which he must reckon, and to which he m 
do justice. No doubt it would be allowed that st 
conceptions are only figurative, being based on hur 
analogies, but I question whether they are not trea 
in practice, as strictly available categories. The conse 
quences of sin are described as penalties which God infil 
for violation of his legislation. 

(3) Not only does the theory represent God’s aveng! 
justice as having no end beyond itself, — as serving no p 
pose but its own self-maintenance, — but it also hypostati 
this quality or attribute of God, and then exalts it il 
a kind of Nemesis to which God is subject. God nm 
obey the stern commands of this theological abstracti 
Moreover, the theory rests on the notion of a dualisn 
God—as when discipline is said to proceed from 
love and punishment from his justice — the only ethi 


1 Op. cit., pp. 428, 424. 


THE NATURE AND ENDS OF PUNISHMENT 331 






nity in his nature being secured by defining justice as 
jpredominating over all rival and contending attributes. 
'This is very much the same kind of unity as that which 
lancient mythology secured among the warring divinities 
lof Olympus by proclaiming Zeus to be superior to all the 
est. 
_ G) If, now, we adopt these human analogies of statutes 
and stripes and lashes, as illustrating the method of God’s 
lgovernment, and then add that the most distinguishing 
peculiarity of the Almighty is his appetite for revenge, 
we shall have the proper logic of the theory under review, 
amely, that it is perfectly reasonable (why not, indeed, 
necessary?) to conceive that God should treat sinful man 
in sheer, naked, retributive justice, on the principle of 
primitive legislation: “ An eye for an eye and a tooth for 
tooth.” Jesus taught, according to Dr. Shedd, that this 
maxim was worthy to be applied not only by human states 
and societies, but in the divine administration of the world. 
he logic of the theory is seldom carried out so rigorously. 
But the question which I would raise is: If the enforce- 
ent of the lex retributionis, or even of the lex talionis, is 
the primary essential of God’s government, what likeli- 
hood is there that in a sinful race there will be any who 
will ever be able to sing: “Thou hast not dealt with 
us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our 
iniquities ” ? 

(5) It is not very difficult to write abstract definitions 
of punishment and chastisement and of the difference 
etween them, but I venture to doubt whether it is a very 
useful industry. It is easy to say that when God “in- 
flicts” a stripe with such and such an intention, the 
roper name for it is “ punishment” (see our previous 
definition of this term), but when he imposes the same 
suffering with another purpose, it should be called “ chas- 
tisement.” This piece of information may possibly have 
some lexicographical interest. But the suggestion which 
I would make is this: Let the theologians whose definitions 
we are reviewing take some term which they have not 
defined in adyance, say, “the moral consequences of sin,” 




















332 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN] 


and tell us, in case they know, what consequences 4 
disciplinary and what merely compensatory; let the 
define the nature and object of the consequences of sin aa 
inform us whether these consequences ever can, ever do, 
ever are intended to secure any moral benefit to sinner 
Leave off your human analogies of lashes and stripes la 
on from without; abandon your logical abstractions of ; 
hypostasis called “the Law,” which God must obey 
protect; lay aside your @ priori definitions of punishme! 
and chastisement, and tell us whether or not God ey 
aims to secure, ever can or does secure, through the cor 
quences of sin, any moral advantage to the sinner. It e& 
move no man’s gratitude to be informed that in so far. 
these consequences are vindicatory they are called puni 
ment, and in so far as they are reformatory the rig 
name for them is discipline. Do the established con 
quences of sin never do those who experience them ar 
good? If the answer is negative, I would then ask: Ho 
do you know? Is it because such a result would be coi 
trary to your ready-made definition? If the answer 
that, even punishment may, perhaps, “ indirectly,” or “ 
cidentally ” work moral improvement in the recipient 
in others, then the theory under review breaks dow 
But Dr. Strong and Dr. Dale left the door open for th 
fatal admission (not so, however, Dr. Shedd). If th 
answer is: God secures only vengeance by punishmen 
though he may secure improvement by discipline, th 
we must insist that this is only the familiar but unprofi 
able truism over again: He secures vengeance by reyen, 
and chastisement by chastising. 

I will only raise this one further question, (6) wheth 
it is likely that the God whom Jesus knew and revyeale 
as the Father in heaven, who in his mercy and generosit 
concerns himself for both the evil and the good, whethe 
I say, it is likely that he is administering a sinful worl 
with sole, or even primary, reference to keeping even wit 
men, to rewarding them in strict accordance with the 
sins, and to preserving the exact balance between the 
deserts and their sufferings? Grant, of course, that si 

















THE NATURE AND ENDS OF PUNISHMENT 333 





eserves punishment. We still ask, with Dr. Dale: Must 
od treat men in strict accordance with their deserts? 
Has he no choice? Is it impossible that he should be 
serciful? Does he act as a blind, unconscious force? ” 
3 God a retributive mechanism rather than a person, 
ad is his primary quality vengeance rather than mercy? 
Tay he not even in “inflicting ” the penalties of sin intend 
) secure, and succeed in securing, the moral betterment of 
ve sinner? As we have seen, there are theologians who 
re disposed to reply in the negative, and some of them 
Ra defined a consistent theory of God’s government 
hich excludes this possibility. Far be it from me to set 
its to what other men may ascertain, but I hope to 
> pardoned for doubting (since certainty only properly 
tises from the possession of knowledge) whether these 
vines have obtained access to the requisite information 
hich alone could give validity and value to this effort to 
"ove a universal negative. 
Let us now outline another mode of conceiving the 
impose and effect of the consequences of sin and the 
otives of God in the government of a sinful world. 
‘his view holds that the world is intended to be primarily 
 training- -school, and not a prison, and that, despite the 
et of sin, it is not wholly lost to its original intention. 
support of this conception anacileeinond like the 
illowing are adduced: (1) Assuming that the analogy 
human civil punishments furnishes the most available 
ustration of the nature and object of the appointed con- 
uences of sin, is it not a fact that with the moral 
olution of society, disciplinary considerations have 
wired an ever enlarging place in the legislative, 
jdicial, and penal treatment of crime? Why has civil- 
ibd society ceased to regard its punishments as devised 
d executed with sole reference to inflicting upon the 
ender an amount of suffering or loss proportionate to 
is misdeed? Would it be maintained that the modern 
tadency in penology illustrates a moral decline from 
loftier conception of punishment for its own sake, 
d a retrogression from the divine ideal of primitive 




















































334 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 


Semitic society: “ An eye for an eye, and a tooth 
a tooth” ? 
(2) But let us bring the subject into personal relatic 
Suppose the power which punishes is not the impers 
“ body politic,” but a person who bears a close relatior 
the offender. Does a wise and just father punish y 
sole regard to retribution — with no thought, desire 
intention for the betterment of his offending child? 
not the relation of God to mankind best represented 
the relation of human parenthood? This was the favo 
illustration of Jesus. But it will be noticed that 
authors whom we have been reviewing do not so muel 
mention this conception of God in discussing the ques 
as to his ways, means, and purposes in dealing with s 1 
man. Dr. Dale, indeed, repudiates the conception 
fatherhood as inapplicable.1_ These writers have muel 
say of God’s relation to the eternal law of righteousr 
but do not sufficiently consider the question of his rela 
to mankind. They seem to imagine that their abstracti 
must be as real to the Almighty as they are to themsel 
It is no wonder that the old theology is suspicious of 
doctrine of God’s fatherhood ; its own conclusions 
chiefly built up in defiance of it. Those who hold 
the concept of fatherhood best represents the rela 
of God to mankind would say with Lidgett: “ The p 
tive is parental; but the paternal is both deeper 
wider than the punitive, just as the punishment 0 
offending child, severely as it may be inflicted and fel 
a narrower circle resting upon and in the midst of 
far wider circle of arrangements which testify to 
father’s love beyond, around, and therefore in the pur 
ment, so it is with the present penal side of the work 
(3) If the justice and wrath of God are held t 
specifically different from love, then it may fair 
1 Christian Doctrine, p. 242. Dr. Dale thinks that the analo; 
human parenthood breaks down at the critical point — at the point ¥ 
it bears upon God’s procedure in saving men. One cannot wonder, | 
that he makes no use of it. But in that case, its uniform and con 


employment by our Lord would seem to have been singularly infeli¢ 
2 The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement, p. 258. 


THE NATURE AND ENDS OF PUNISHMENT 335 


ed that the consequences of sin illustrate solely 
rod’s retributive justice. If, as Dr. Simon holds, God 
pees to love men just in proportion as he is angry with 
em on account of their sin, then we must conclude that 
jod’s relation to sin and sinners is wholly definable in 
rms of wrath. But if righteousness is a constitutive 
tement of perfect love ; if wrath is a name for the holy 
nergy with which love repudiates and condemns its 
posite, then it is no longer possible to conceive of God 
§ dealing with sinful men in mere naked, avenging 
stice, on the supposition that justice is superior to love 
od independent of it. The notion of the purely retalia- 
bry aim and effect of punishment rests upon this dualistic 
bparation of attributes in God. We have already seen 
fat itisuntenable. It rests upon a psychology which is 
happlicable to any personal being ; it is logically sub- 
ersive of the very idea of personal unity. The theory 
equally intolerable from an ethical point of view. 
father who should deal with the faults of his children 
4 sheer vengeance —with sole regard to proportioning 
heir sufferings to their deserts, and with no thought 
concern for their moral betterment,— would be 
| mething less than human and would be an object of 
Mmiversal execration. Yet many theologians, by a ready- 
jade definition of “ punishment,” and by erecting the 
‘bstraction “law” into a kind of Nemesis to sie God 
‘imself is subject, seek to show that in ordaining and 
forcing the penalties of sin God is concerned only to 
veigh out the quantum of suffering which each offence 
serves. This Deity of the theological books does not 
em to me to be the same God as the Father in heaven 
‘£ whom Jesus spoke. But, happily, he is only the theo- 
tie Divinity of abstract thought, not the God of Chris- 
an life and experience. 
|) I would raise the question whether the analogies 
human resentment have not been greatly overworked 
the interest of the theory that the divine penalties for 
ns are merely vindicative. No doubt, human anger may 
/) engross a man’s thought and feeling as to exclude, for 





































































336 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTR 8. 


the time, every emotion except that of vengeance. 
is it suitable to attribute to God any such loveless fu 
such an absorption in the passion for evening accou 
with sinful men as excludes from the divine mind 
thought, desire, or effort for their moral improvem 21 
Human punishments, at the best, are fitful, occasio: 
clumsily proportioned to the offence, and mechani 

inflicted. Are we to find in these crudities the 
God’s moral government? It is convenient for cert 
theoretic purposes to do so; but I must question whet 
this procedure is instructive or even legitimate. Me 
punishing deal with isolated acts ; God, no doubt, de 
with the character, that is, with the man. Yet even hum 


more and more believed to be possible to lead men se 
view and to take their punishment as that it sho 
become a fire of purifying to them. If to this it 
answered : True enough, but in so far as this is desir 
attempted, or secured, their treatment is not “puni 
ment,” but “chastisement,” we can only reply as bef 
that we are not concerned about such purely formal ¢ 
tinctions between words. If it is admitted that the « 
sequences which are ordained in the moral order for 
may in any way or degree work beneficial moral effe 
then it matters not by what word you decide to name # 
process and result. If this admission is made, it mea 
that God’s treatment of sin and sinners is not mer 
retaliatory, that is, designed and executed solely to sati: 
an appetite for vengeance, but that it is also disciplii 

and reformatory. The admission — apart from all questic 
as to what definitions shall be assigned to certain w 
—means that human history under God’s provident 
government is not merely a probation, but a traini 
We have seen that neither Dr. Dale nor Dr. Strong w 
quite rigorous enough in his logic wholly to exclude 
concession. Probably Dr. Shedd did succeed in theore 
eally excluding the possibility that punishment may e& 
do any creature of God any good, but does he not a 
logically define away the very mercy of God and the pe 


THE NATURE AND ENDS OF PUNISHMENT 337 





sibility of salvation for sinners? But it is a comfort to 
vemember that the world is governed neither by “law,” 
ior by theological definitions, but by a personal God. 

| (©) So long as sin, guilt, and punishment are treated in 
i kind of quantitative way, it seems plausible enough to 
salance one against another and to assert that so much 
sin entails so much guilt and that this much guilt 
leserves that much suffering. But are not such repre- 
jentations really crude and superficial ? It is not sin, but 
inners, who are punished. It is not guilt, but persons, 
vho deserve punishment. The mere retributive guid pro 
yuo conception of punishment loses its plausibility as soon 
is we cease dealing with abstractions as if they were 
: a This, then, is our question: If we conceive of 
) personal God as dealing with personal sinful men, can 
ve believe that the consequences which he has ordained 
‘or their sins have sole reference to evening accounts with 
hem for their past? Does not the notion of so much pain 
le so much sin positively travesty the real method of the 
*ather of spirits in dealing with his sinful children, so far 
iS we can form any rational conception of his purpose and 
Mredare? Is it possible that a wise and benevolent 
om has no concern for the future of sinners, treats them 





olely with reference to their back debts and with no pur- 
yose or plan for their betterment ? 
All agree, of course, that sin is blameworthy and deserves 
0 be punished. But an increasing number of theologians 
ire of opinion that this fact does not supply the whole 
hilosophy of God’s treatment of sinners. ‘I hold,” 
writes Dr. Moberly, “that we must emphatically claim 
hat punishment, inflicted as discipline, 7s punishment. 
0 rule out from the word ‘punishment’ all suffering 
flicted or accepted, in the name of righteousness, and 
nto righteousness as an end —to rule out all personal 
iscipline meant for personal holiness— would be to rule 
ut at least the far larger part of all that any of us has, in 
act, ever known or meant by punishment.” “All punish- 
ent,” he elsewhere declares, “begins as discipline ”; its 















1 Atonement and Personality, p. 11. 


























338 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRI 


retributive character is “secondary in reference t 
primary purpose, which is a purpose of beneficent lo 
“on reflection, we recognize that all our punishmeni 
really the disciplinary motive and meaning; that is, 
really a means, so to change personalities which are 
potentially righteous but actually sinful, as to make t 
in consummated antithesis against sin, actually 
eous.”? Similarly Dr. Clarke defends a disciplinary 
reformatory purpose for punishment. “There is a 
intention in retribution, looking toward the putting 4 
of evils.” “In the long run retribution has we 
toward moral improvement.” ‘The disciplinary it 
in the retributive arrangements of this world is plai 
Into the further questions raised by these and other wri 
such as: May punishment entirely fail of accomplis 
its disciplinary purpose, and if so, would it contint 
mere retribution ? we need not enter. We have pur 
the subject far enough to illustrate the two contr 
theories : (1) Punishment is primarily, or even exclusi 
vindicative ; (2) it is primarily, if not solely, discipli 
From this analysis it is apparent that the penal th 
of atonement stands or falls with the vindicatory co 
tion of punishment. The logic of the theory is: Pu 
ment is suffering necessarily inflicted upon sinne; 
order to satisfy God’s justice. If that punishment 
to be inflicted, then his justice must be satisfied by 
infliction of some equivalent suffering upon some one 
is substituted in the place of sinners. What I y 
point out is that the argument collapses just in § 
as the particular philosophy of punishment in questi 
modified or weakened. Hence the multitude of ¢ 
penal views which try to hold that Christ’s sufferings 
death in some undefined way met the ends of penalty 
satisfaction of the divine wrath against sin), alth 
they were not of the same nature with penalty. 
this standpoint two things seem evident to me: (1) 
the penal view is a speculative construction derive 
1 Op. cit., pp. 13, 14, 23, 24. 
2 Outline of Christian Theology, p. 254. 


THE NATURE AND ENDS OF PUNISHMENT 339 


















principles, from an a priori theory of God’s attributes 
moral government, and (2) that the quasi-penal views, 
as we have had occasion to notice (see p. 190 sq.), 
empt the difficult task of sustaining, by main strength, 
onclusion whose major premiss has either fallen away 
become seriously weakened. It is not strange, there- 
e, that, at this crucial point in their expositions, the 
ocates of these theories lapse into the vaguest and 
st thought-defying generalities, such as that Christ 
our death, assumed the responsibility of our sins, 
fered as if accursed of God, or endured penal effects ; 
his death was an act of homage to the eternal law of 
hteousness and possessed Godward or objective signifi- 
ce, and the like. 

But what if God is really dealing with sinful men, and 
with the abstractions, sin and guilt and law? And 
what if the deserved consequences of sin have some part 
he plan of eternal love? What if the purpose of 
rist’s coming and work were to rescue men to sonship 
o God and to help them to realize their true life in his 
gdom? Then it would appear that Christ poured 
his life for men, not to meet the ends of punitive 
ice, but to save them from the sin which makes justice 
ive, delivering them from the terror and despair with 
ich sinners must ever contemplate the righteous Judge, 
neing them that forgiving love is mightier than the 
ice before which they tremble. In this view Christ did 
exhaust the consequences of sin in himself in order that 
re might be none left over for us, but came to break 
power of evil and to establish the power of goodness 
human life, so that the flow of penal consequences might, 
he nature of the case, be arrested. 








CHAPTER V 


THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 








THE subject which is covered by this title has } 
prevailingly treated in theology under the Pauline ¢ 
gory of justification. This fact is due, in general, to 
predominant influence of Paul upon theological cong 
tions and terminology, and, more especially, to. the 
cumstance that justification, being a forensic term, ace 
well with the legal analogies under which the 4 
doctrine of salvation has been construed in traditic 
dogmatics. We shall, in due time, seek to determine 
content and legitimate use of the Pauline idea of justi 
tion; meantime, let us consider the corresponding t 
which is characteristic of the teaching of Jesus and of 
earliest apostolic preaching, — the forgiveness of sins 

We may begin by recalling the form which the doe : 
of remission received in the older Protestant theolc 
In outline it was as follows: For every sin God has 
dained a definite quantum of penal suffering. This sut 
ing his retributive righteousness obliges him to inf 
Being disposed, however, by his grace to make poss 
the exemption of (some) men from these penalties, he 
putes the sins of those whom he would save to his § 
who vicariously endures the punishment which they 
serve. By this voluntary endurance of penal sufferi 
in deference to retributive justice, the Saviour has aequ 
a treasury of merits which are, in turn, upon their ace 
ance of the same, imputed to those in whose place he di 
Thus the prescribed penalties of sin are remitted, de 
through their being inflicted upon another, and de, 
through the consent and confidence of sinful men in’ 
twofold imputation. Forgiveness is thus an acquitta 

340 




























ne sty, a suspension of penalty; it is a verdict of “not 
* before the law, a letting-g go, a declaration that 
| believer is “righteous,” that is, to be now regarded 
treated as righteous; this is justification. 
r this interpretation of our subject appeal is con- 
tly made to the biblical use of the terms in question. 
ustification ” is certainly in Paul an actus forensis, a 
e of exemption from penalty and of acceptance into 
sfavor. As for “forgiveness,” it is in the Old Testa- 
at a “ covering over” of sin, a hiding of it from God’s 
while in the New it is a remission, a releasing, or 
g-go (adeois). How perfectly do these terms 
ord with the analogy of the law court! How aptly 
they describe the formality of a verdict which dis- 
ses the accusation and proclaims the accused blameless 
e the law! Moreover, how harmoniously does this 
ption blend with those of penal substitution and im- 
ion — ideas whose biblical warrant and authoritative 
ter are established, for the theology under consid- 
n, beyond the remotest possibility of doubt. 
now, we inquire, what is the relation of this verdict 
emption to real salvation, — how does it stand con- 
meted with the life of Godlike love which, according to 
rist, 7s salvation, it will be apparent that it can hardly 
ore than a preliminary, or condition precedent. This 
mitted and even maintained as the chief commenda- 
of the doctrine in question by the older theology. 
ication is one thing; sanctification is quite another. 
a to do with putative righteousness; the other has 
ib with real righteousness. Considered simply as such, 
3 justified sinner is no more righteous after than before 
ation. He is declared righteous, that is, he is 
ically and legally so,—righteous so far as any ver- 
of condemnation is concerned, — exempt from accusa- 
and ey. Now the way is clear for him to begin 


the remission of sins, if it stood alone,” aa 
e, “would leave us unsaved, is one of the common- 


THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS S2ul s 


a ae 







































342 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRI 
places of Christian theology.” In the type of the 
of which Dr. Dale is speaking, and of which he app1 
forgiveness is a preliminary of salvation rather th 
part of it. 

The estimate which I would form of this co 
thought may be inferred, in general, from previous ¥ 
ences to the scheme of which it is a part. Certainl 
judicious theologian would deny that it covers impor 
truths and has served a useful purpose. I should 1 
no objection to it, if it were always regarded a 
analogical or figurative representation, — an anthrope 
phic picture of moral and spiritual realities and proce 
true suggestively and illustratively, but, when taken 
scientific formula, inadequate and misleading. One 
say of this Jewish legalist scheme (for such it is) 
the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says of Jud 
in general, that it furnishes useful types and pictur 
the heavenly realities which must not, however, be 
founded with these realities themselves. We pro 
have just here the best illustration of Professor Jow 
remark that theology is more largely under the infly 
of figures of speech than any other branch of thoug 
knowledge. There are really two figures which 
dominated the orthodox doctrine of forgiveness, — th 
the discharge of a debt by vicarious payment and th 
the acquittal of a culprit. The one is a comme cia 
other a legal figure. The former is germane & 
Anselmic doctrine of atonement, the latter, to the 
Reformation doctrine. One can appeal to the comm 
word “ransom ” in the teaching of Jesus; the other 
more plausibly, to the judicial word “ justify” im 
These figures are commonly used interchangeably 
properly so, as long as their use is merely illustr: 
but, as we have seen, when taken as prescribing the 
of a theory, they are quite different and carry very 
ent implications. Any person who has the means a 
disposition can pay another’s debt and so procure his 
charge from obligation to pay it; but it is a very dif 


1 The Atonement, p. 386. 


THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 343 





- and one by no means so obviously true, to say that 
person may experience another’s punishment. It is 
her clear that if our debts have been paid once by 
other it would be unjust to require that they be paid a 
cond time; since that prepayment, then, we cannot 
ve been obligated by them. It is evident as soon as 
ie begins ius to press this commercial analogy, that it 
entirely inadequate to serve as a scientific thought- 
m for the moral and spiritual realities involved in for: 
veness. The same holds true of the legal analogy. 
ie judge who “justifies ” the accused, that is, dismisses 
case as not proved, — has no concern with his character, 
nds in no special relation to him outside the terms of 
particular charge made, and passes no verdict on his 
almoral condition. How evident it is that the analogies 
ea are drawn from such commercial and legal relations 
processes as these are too remote from morality and 
» artificial and anthropomorphic to serve as precise or 
equate descriptions of the method of the fatherly love of 
od in dealing with sinful men. 
Our first constructive task is to see if we can determine 
2 Christian idea of forgiveness. To this end a mere 
ppection of the words rendered “forgive” would not 
peatly aid us; they are themselves figurative terms, and 
















byken of God’s forgiveness of men rather incidentally 
d by allusion. He uses a certain idea of the divine 
‘giveness as a test and measure of human forgiveness. 
I forgive as God forgives is one of the conditions of son- 
sp to God, that is, ae participation in the Kingdom of 
Dy Godlike. Hence Jesus teaches that men must love 
ir enemies and be ready to forgive and bless them. 
Lis readiness to forgive, this granting of forgiveness, as 
ivere in advance, is one of the conditions of obtaining 
iiine remission of sins. ‘ Forgive us our debts,” we 
‘taught to pray, “as we also have forgiven (adnjxapev) 
[ debtors ” (Mt. vi. 12). “For if ye forgive men their 
passes, your heavenly Father will ako: forgive you. 
















































344 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTR 


But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neithe 
your Father forgive your trespasses” (Mt. vi. 14, 
The parable of the Great Debtor (Mt. xviii. 21- 
designed to teach the duty of a full and free humai 
giveness by reference to the example of the divine fou 
ness. Not “until seven times” only, but “ until se 
times seven”; that is, freely, largely, liberally, mu 
forgive the penitent offender. Why? Because it 
that God forgives, and because we cannot be forgiv 
him unless we possess this forgiving spirit. But 
two reasons blend into one. God can receive to his 
only those who aspire and strive to be like himself. 
cruel and revengeful are not forgivable; only the me 
obtain mercy at his hands. . 
But the most striking picture of the divine forgiy 

is contained in the parable of the Lost Son. The 
waiting of the father for the first sign of penitence 
anticipation of the son’s return by the paternal ce 
sion, the rapturous welcome, the merriment and feast 
these are the outlines of the picture of the forgivin 
of God. Now the question arises: What idea as 1 
‘nature of forgiveness most naturally emerges from 
various comparisons and illustrations? It is plain,’ 
first place, that God forgives as a Father. Jesus 
almost uniformly of forgiveness in connection wi 
teaching about God’s fatherhood and man’s true § 
to him. It is a question on what terms and con 
“your Father” can forgive you. It is a question 
men’s being like their Father in forgiving love. 
when Jesus wishes to illustrate at once the nature 
and of recovery from it, he pictures an unfilial life 
which the wandering son is restored by paternal k 
his normal relations in the home of his father. 
It appears, then, alike from the descriptions of ] 
forgiveness and from the allusions to its divine 
that forgiveness is a restoration of personal relati 
reconstitution of impaired or sundered ties. Amor 
it is a becomiyg reconciled to one’s brother man 
least, a prominent factor in effecting such a reconeili 


THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 345 































larly, in God, it is the reception of sinful man into 
favor and fellowship. It is the Father's welcome of 
lisobedient, but now repentant son ; the admission of him 
his normal place in the home, an admission as complete 
fhe had never wandered away. In such ways did Jesus 
be God’s forgiveness. It is viewed as a paternal 
king its character and significance from the fatherly 
of God to man. Jesus made no use of legal 
es to illustrate its nature; the conception of debt 
its remission which he employed, alternates with such 
ms as trespasses and sins, and is obviously figurative. 
e official and almost impersonal relations of the 
rt and of the abstraction called-the-divine law or 
nment, he made no use. So far as we can judge, 
= conceptions had no place in his thoughts. Is it 
table that we should supplement his mode of repre- 
g the subject by terms of a more legal and official 
The traditional theology has done even more than 
; it has supplanted Jesus’ intensely personal descrip- 
f forgiveness with an apparatus of judicial processes, 
ances, equivalences, imputations, and fiats,—and 
s not hesitated to disparage the favorite analogy 
us for describing the subject as inadequate and de- 
lye at the most crucial point. To my mind, however, 
s other analogies, such as the relations involved in a 
t law, or in a financial transaction, may be especially 
al for illustrating particular aspects of the subject, 
f should be held subordinate to our Lord’s mode of 
ing and describing forgiveness. Nor do I believe 
rightly estimated, the New Testament yields any 
ption of the matter which differs essentially from 


Eeeirits essentially kindred, of Seal nl rela- 
, is the specifically Christian view. 


of Jesus about forgiveness is that he does not 
lize the existence of any obstacle to forgiveness in 
yhich requires to be removed by a propitiation before 


is tinctly ethical and personal view of it. At any 


346 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTR 


he can exercise forgiving grace. It is this fact, as we 
seen, which has led some theologians to deny that th 
any gospel in the teaching of Jesus, and to see in it 
a kind of prelude to the ampler truth of subseq 
flection. Our Lord is very explicit, however, in st 
that there are conditions of forgiveness on man’s side. 
offender must sincerely repent, that is, he must realiz 
acknowledge his fault, must condemn and repudiai 
This he obviously could not do unless he saw and prek 
the right, the good, and the true with which his evil 
and choices stand in contrast. He must in some rez 
break with the evil of which he would be forgiven, ai 
aspiration and preference identify himself with the 
If he would have God receive him, he must come to { 
if he would live his true life as a son of God, he mus 
sake the far-eountry of sin and return to his home at 
Father. And one who thus dares to hope in God’s1 
toward his own offences will, as a matter of cour 
charitable toward those who have offended against his 
If in reconciliation with God we must come over t 
side— make his character our goal—and standa 
then, of course, we must be merciful-as he is @ 
ful; to be unforgiving would be to deny the very me 
of the forgiveness which we desire for ourselves, be 
we can be forgiven only when we choose and aspire 
Godlike. Such are the conditions of forgiveness i 
teaching of Jesus, and besides them he recogniz 
other. 
This same conception of forgiveness, according ti 
Book of Acts, underlay the earliest apostolic preac 
The principal references to the subject are as fol 
Peter calls upon his fellow-Jews to repent and be 
tized to the end of receiving the remission of sins 
ii. 88). Again he declares that God has exalted € 
to his right hand to bestow repentance and remissi 
sins (Acts v. 81). He counsels Simon Magus to 1 
of the wicked thought of his heart if perhaps it m 
forgiven him (Acts viii. 22). Paul declares that thi 
the man Jesus is proclaimed to the Jews remissit 







THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 347 



























is and a justification unattainable by the law (Acts xiii. 
39), and that he has been commissioned to go to the 
ntiles bearing the gospel of repentance and remission 
ts xxvi. 18, 20). Unless we supplement these refer- 
es liberally from other sources, we can find here only 
idea of a free forgiveness, available through Christ, an 
o of his word that he had come to seek and to save the 


For Paul “ justification ” and “ forgiveness” are synony- 
mousterms. He illustrates the reckoning of the believer's 
h to him for righteousness by quoting the Psalmist’s 
ds: ‘Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, 
whose sins are covered” (Rom. iv. 7). Only in 
later epistles, however, in which the Jewish category 
justification no longer appears, do we find a direct use 
de of the term “ forgiveness.” Here the apostle teaches 
that God has graciously blessed us (€yapicato ; Eng. vss. 
ath forgiven,” “forgave”) in, or through, Christ (é 
pict), and declares that through his blood we have our 


eceiving the forgiveness of all their trespasses (Col. ii. 13). 
t will be noticed that the idea of forgiveness here stands 
the closest connection with those thoughts which the 
stle is fond of expressing by the phrase “in Christ.” 
Christ God has forgiven us, that is, in union with him, 


3s in and with the bestowment of a new life in Christ. 
is conception of dying to sin and rising to newness of 
with Christ is quite as characteristic of Paul’s thought 
e idea of justification, and far more pervading in his 
ngs.2 In his polemic against a Judaizing theology 
naturally uses, by preference, the terms whose import 
explanation were in dispute, but in the more positive 
independent development of his own conception of 
tion he chiefly employs biological, rather than legal, 


1 Eph. iv. 32; ef. Col. iii. 13. 
2 Of. my Theology of the New Testament, pp. 428-430. 



























348 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 


analogies. Here salvation is conceived as a vital proce: 
rather than as a formal acquittal or decree of exempti 
from penalty. We shall pursue this matter further wh 
we come to consider the Pauline idea of salvation by 
with Christ. 

From this résumé of the New Testament references 
the subject I am led to conclude that the two most eh 
acteristic notes in the Christian doctrine of forgiven 
are these: (1) it is a paternal act —the restoration 
one who is by right a son, to normal relations with 
heavenly Father; and (2) it is an experience which 
involved in our entrance into life-fellowship with Chr 
and the realization of a new hope and a new life in hi 
How far is forgiveness, then, from having the characte 
a mere court-verdict, a pronouncement or decree! 
well conceive that a human father’s recovery and resto 
tion of an unfilial son to his right relations with hims 
were some such legal formality. It is rather a trium 
of love, a victory of influence, an achievement in the wo: 
of personal relations. 

The first of these two ideas just mentioned is the ke 
note of our Lord’s teaching on the subject; the seco 
is the keynote of Paul’s thought. They are perfect 
accordant, belonging, as they both do, to the sphere 
moral realities and relations. The latter is but a pr 
duction or elaboration of the former. Since Christ I 
shown us the way to the Father, it is in fellowship w 
him that we come to God. Since he alone has reali 
the life of perfect sonship to God, it is through him ale 
that we can recover our ownsimpaired sonship. »The 
ideas meet in the truth of Christ’s mediation. He revea 
at once the Father whose forgiveness we need, and assut 
us of his readiness to receive us, and, also, quickens in 
the sense of sin and the impulse to repentance. \ He git 
repentance that he may procure us remission. “In felloy 
ship with him we see our unlikeness to God, yet he enabl 
us to hope in a possible likeness to him. Yes, forgivene 
is an act of fatherly compassion, and it is in the compa 
of Christ that we come to its secure realization. 


~ 


THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 349 




























The indispensable condition of forgiveness which is 
ecognized in Scripture and by the moral judgment of 
gankind, is penitence. “If he repent, forgive him” is 
e law slike Tor-Faman and for the divine forgiveness. 
Té we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to for- 


nk from implying that God would be unjust if he 
| not forgive on condition of true repentance. He 
kwould be unrighteous if he were implacable. Jesus laid 
pon the conscience of mankind the duty of forgiveness, 
upon repentance, as absolute and imperative. Why? 
Because it is Godlike so to forgive. He grounded this 
duty where he grounded all duty —in the obligation to 
be like God —in the requirement that men should live 
and act as the sons of God. The disposition to forgive 
‘sa part of moral perfection. ‘The conception that God 
syer was or could be unwilling to forgive is a contradic- 
tion to the biblical idea of God. There not only is, but 
syer has been, and ever must be, forgiveness with him. 
de evinces his righteousness, his equity, his perfection, 
1 forgiving upon condition of sincere penitence. He 
ould be less just than men are required to be if it were 
ytherwise. This apostolic note is but an echo of the 
eaching of the prophets: God’s righteousness includes 
nis grace; for his name’s sake, that is, because of what 


u 











What is repentance that it should warrant, and: 
>ven eeajaire, forgiveness? Might some other condition 
4s well have been prescribed? We must answer that 
mitence is a sincere regret and sorrow for sin because 
hat sin is seen and felt to be. It is a moral revulsion 


nee and yearning for the good, that is, for the Godlike. 

he language of human relations, which Jesus did not 
te to use in illustration, penitence is the sense of 
eat and failure in the life of disobedience and selfish 
ation; it is the misery and wretchedness of self- 


ive us our sins” (1 Jn. i. 9). The author does not , 


tom the evil of sin. Its more positive aspect is a prefer- _ 


: ; 
Lar 


850 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 


banishment from the father’s house. And this feel 
is sharpened by the thought of the paternal love 
bounty and by the vision of home with its open 
and waiting welcome. At length penitence ripens i 
the resolution and act of returning home. Can there 
any question why repentance is necessary to forgivent 
That were like asking why the disobedient son needs 
go home—why it is necessary for him to change 
former attitude and action toward his father’s love 
bounty. Disobedience and ingratitude have sunde 
the true relations of the home; a sense of the wrong a 
folly of his action and of the rightfulness of the fil 
obedient life is absolutely essential to reconciliatior 
forgiveness and harmony. 

Repentance has, then, these two principal eleme 
which show its relation to forgiveness: (1) it is a si 
and realization of the evil of sin; and (2) it is, in so 
measure at least, a hungering and thirsting after rig 
eousness —an act of homage to the good and the ti 
however dimly seen—a dawning conviction and prefer 
ence in favor of a holy, Godlike life. These two eleme 
of penitence are not at all separable; neither can & 
without the other. They are the negative and p 
tive sides of the same truth —two aspects of the s 
experience. 

It is the peculiarity of sin that it never dares to be itsel 
—to stand forth frankly in its true character. The sin 
always seeks to persuade himself that his sin is some § 
of goodness, or is at least justifiable and therefore not, 
the whole, bad in the circumstances. Evil always tries 
cloak itself in a semblance of goodness. Satan transform 
himself into an angel of light. No advocate ever stooe 
to defend the evil as such. He can only defend the & 
inal on the supposition that his act was in some degre 
justified or excused by extenuating circumstances. Th 
can be no eloquence on behalf of sin as sin. Hence sel 
ishness always calls itself legitimate self-interest, 
names itself firmness, arrogance seems to itself to be 
self-respect. It is due to this tendency of sin to disg 





























THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 301 




















_ itself that the most subtle sins of temper and motive have 
so commonly masqueraded in the guise of piety. ‘* Hypoc- 
i i ” Now, true 
enitence brings to an end this conscious or unconscious 
Penitence is the vision of sin as itis; it isthe 


mation to break with the evils which impair character and 
conduct and to identify one’s self with the good which he 
| now sees that he has failed to realize. How far removed 
this deep ethical experience of the soul from anything 
that can be more than remotely illustrated by court-pro- 


But we.are told that all human penitence is imperfect — 
| that it involves but an inadequate sense of sin and a very 
partial appreciation of righteousness. Our very sinful- 
| ness, it is said, prevents us from being adequately peni- 
“tent. Dr. Moberly has laid great stress upon this thought ! 


that men never adequately realize the evil of sin and the 
worth of goodness. But is it not the — nature of the 














tentions—not because of what they are in themselves, 
but for what they promise and are capable of becoming ? 


ard a kind of quantitative conception of penitence, as 
| if salvation were a sort of guid pro quo affair. His idea 
that only a sinless person can be adequately penitent, 
strikes me as paradoxical in the extreme. Is penitence 
Tegret and remorse for others’ sins or for one’s own? I 
have always supposed the latter to be the case. It has 


that we need to become penitents. The definitions in 
question view penitence too abstractly and impersonally.- 
It is true that penitence means a realization of sin and an 


1 Atonement and Personality, ch. ii. 





H 
a4 


352 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE — 
















appreciation of goodness, but it means these on the part of 
sinners and in their own experience of sin and of moral 
aspiration and effort. 
If, then, repentance has the character which we hayeé 
assigned to it, it is obvious that he who makes us see anc 
feel our sins and, at the same time, reveals and realizes 
before our eyes the Godlike life, does something for our 
salvation whose practical value and power are beyond all 
doubt or dispute. Men may find the conception that 
he pays our back debts quite irrelevant ; they may pro: 
nounce the idea that he confesses or repents of our sins 
for us unintelligible ; they may regard the notion that he 
endures our punishment and so exempts us from it as 
immoral and absurd; but if it can be shown that in him 
is manifested a goodness of God which leads men to re 
pentance ; if it can be seen that he quickens in men those 
desires and aspirations after Godlikeness which make them 
hate their sins, and if it is plain that he does actually ane 
effectually open the Kingdom of heaven to the believer, 
then here is a power of God unto salvation which noné 
can gainsay. To all the schemes to which we have just 
referred, the strongest moral objections have been mo 
and more keenly felt. It has been, not infrequentl 
acknowledged by advocates of the penal view that 
must be accepted on sheer authority. It is a biblical 
idea, argue Drs. Smeaton and Crawford, and it is of 
smd#ll consequence whether we can justify it to reason or 
not. It is imposed upon all Christian minds, contend 
Dr. Hodge, by unquestionable biblical authority ; henee 
none but unbelievers have ever doubted its truth.1 The 
fact remains, however, that within the Church itself, all 
legal and commercial interpretations of what Christ does 
for our salvation have been more and more discreditet 
and abandoned.? 
1 Cf. p. 184. | 
2 In the symposium on the atonement published by the London Chri 
tian World in 1899-1900, and participated in by representative divines ol 
various nationalities, I find that, of the seventeen articles, ten illustrat 


the moral view and four a governmental or quasi-penal interpretation 
The other three I am unable to classify. In his Moral Evolution Prest 


Fz 


THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 30 




























_ We ean scarcely suppose that the representatives of the 
_ forensic theology fully realized the desperateness of their 
ease when they admitted the alternative: You may either 
follow your moral reason in the interpretation of the sav- 
ing work of Christ, or you may submit to and receive the 
teaching of the Bible; the choice lies between them. 
or all doubtful or perplexed minds—for all who can 
e no way to subjugate their moral judgments to what 
ealled “bare authority” (as if in the field of morals or 
| religion there could be any such thing) —this means: 
| Choose between a certain, more or less official, interpreta- 
Bon of the biblical language about atonement and what 
em to you to be the axioms of ethics and equity. In the 
presence of such an alternative the issue could hardly be 
doubtful — and it has been what might have been expected. 
But, really, it was the authority of an interpretation which 
was contended for. The question is: What is biblical ? 
| and this question was quite too easily solved. The history 
of this controversy seems to me to have made two things 
absolutely evident : (1) that the biblical doctrine of salva- 
‘tion cannot be legitimately deduced from a few figurative 
| and illustrative words and phrases; and (2) that nothing 
‘eould be more perilous or do a more doubtful honor to 
the Bible, than to propose a choice between its authority 
_ the moral reason of man. I conclude that a view of 
| Christ’s work — partial and incomplete though it may be 
ae men can grasp and construe in terms of moral 
| awk 3 a view which correlates that work to ye actual 
goles ; 
view which brings the saving mercy of God ass into 
“our human life a discovers to us One at our side who 
actually proves himself to be the way to the Father — 
ach a view alone can appeal to and satisfy “the modern 
mind.” It is vain to flourish the weapons of authority. 

































| dent George Harris, speaking of Bushnell’s Vicarious Sacrifice, says: 
“He denied all theories of a substitutionary bearing of penalty or its 
nivalent. A heated controversy followed. But now his views are 
ore generally accepted than any other views of the sacrifice of Christ ”’ 


554. CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTR of 


The men of our time understand too well that the author 
ity with which they are threatened is but the autho 
of one mode of viewing the problem. ‘They assert fe 
themselves the right to judge and estimate the varion 
references of Scripture to the subject — which is reall 
what all interpretations have always done. They insis 
that, in the deepest and truest sense, that is biblical whiel 
accords with the fundamental Christian concepts of Go 
and man, and they refuse to acknowledge the bindin 
force of far-fetched inferences from illustrative figures 0 
speech or the prescriptive authority of a dogmatic tradi 
tion which arose and developed in a world of ideas — sue 
as those of feudalism and Germanic law — which, for th 
modern man, has been radically modified or has eye 
passed out of existence altogether. 

From this seeming digression I return to the thought 
that one of the greatest and most obvious saving deeds 6 
Christ for us is that he gives repentance and so remissioi 
He makes us feel and know our sin and shows us the sur 
way of escape.from it. I should like to present thi 
thought in the well-chosen words of another: “ Christ’ 
forgiveness begins by revealing our sin. Or, it begins b 
revealing God’s justice, and by uttering in our conscience 
his condemnation of sin. Christ makes this revelation ii 
many ways. He makes it by his personal character —} 
his very presence in the world. The sinless One leave 
us ‘no cloak for our sin.’ Christ, and Christ alone, ii 
able to give this revelation of evil. But further, thi 
whole development of Christ’s history is a further revela 
tion of evil. Good as such, and sin as such, are there see 
in conflict. And the whole evil of our sin is made plai 
to us when we perceive that we are sinning against love 
The cross is the supreme manifestation of sin. There wi 
see sin, not only in outward acts, but in Christ’s exceed 
ing sickness and sorrow under the burden of the world’ 
wickedness. At the cross of Christ believers have alway 
learned how evil sin is. Whether or not their doctrina 
explanations of their own experience have been correct 
the experience itself has been God-given, spiritual, sayin o, 








THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS 300 






























wrist has convinced them of sin. Christ condemns not 
immediate persecutors, but the whole world. He 
yeals our malady as not weakness or accident but 
alt. 2 

he question remains: What, precisely, does forgive- 
by itself considered, accomplish? How far does it 


we that any general, abstract answer, which will be 
y applicable to all cases, can be given to this 
iestion. It depends largely upon the nature of a given 
or course of sinful action, how far forgiveness — the 
ne forgiveness even—can cancel its effects. If, for 
aple, in human relations, one man envies or hates an- 
her, a genuine reconciliation between them, including 
Tgiveness, would cancel the ill-will and heal the aliena- 
ion. If, on the other hand, in a fit of rage one man has 
armanently injured or killed another, or by a course of 
ysical indulgence has undermined his own health or 
nged his family into misery and disgrace, here are con- 
quences which persist though the man in question were 
become a saint. 


committed. It cannot efface the memory of the fact. It 
es not obliterate regret and remorse on account of the 
Nor can forgiveness wipe out at once all the moral 
msequences of sinful action. Sin works a moral de- 
erioration from which men do not recover in a moment, 
ough they may suddenly enter on the way to recovery 
pm it. There are sins which leave scars in the moral 
e which with greatest difficulty, and often never, are 
ed. The natural flow of evils, physical and social, 
vich follow certain forms of sin, is not arrested, com- 
pletely and all at once, even by God’s forgiveness. 

_ But we are speaking here of forgiveness “ by itself con- 
ed.” It should be added, however, that, in fact, for- 
ness never stands thus wholly isolated ; certainly the 
ne forgiveness never operates wholly “by itself.” 


1 Professor Robert Mackintosh, Essays towards a New Theology, 
p. 48, 49 
95 . 


ido or neutralize our sin and its effects? I do not be-” 


Forgiveness cannot undo the fact that the sin has been } 





































Forgiveness is but one factor in salvation. 
the act of reconciliation which we call forgiveness, 
ate personal influences and agencies. The pardon of 
is never conceived in Scripture in separation from 
cleansing, life-bestowing action of the divine Spi 
Were it otherwise, the doctrine of remission would bea 
_ very formal and negative character. But not even 
Paul is justification or forgiveness a mere non-imputat 
of sin; it is a reckoning of faith for righteousness, a 
faith means union of life with Christ and carries us i 
that world of vital and transforming personal influer 
which the apostle associates with the phrase “in Chr 
Forgiveness, then, as a name for the beginning or reste 
tion of right personal relations, denotes the first step, 
the divine side, in the development of the saved life. ) 
such it signifies the cessation of God’s disfavor and ¢ 
domnation on account of past sin and his gracious re 
tion of the sinner into his friendship. It alters mi 
relation to his sinful past since he now knows that h 
ing broken with that past, his future life is not t 
determined by it, and he is enabled to believe that ¢ 
now regards and treats him not according to what he 
been, or even according to what he is to-day, but accord 
to what he would like to be. Forgiveness is the rey 
tion and the first realization of grace, and in that grace 
that undeserved favor of God — that eagerness of Go 
recover and bless men — lie all the powers and possibili 
of salvation. “ Forgiveness is not complete salvation, 
opens the way to it. It gives a man a clean record ¥ 
God, so far as condemnation is concerned, and the op] 
tunity of a new start in life under God’s own influen 
It is the transition from a guilty past to a holy future,’ 


1 Clarke, Outline of Christian Theology, pp. 257, 268. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO MANKIND 







WE have next to consider a question which has been 
more or less agitated throughout the whole history of 
theology : Did the purpose of Christ’s mission have sole 
veference to the salvation of men from sin? Or, to put 
it in more general terms: Was his work a part of the 
divine plan of the world?~ Is there reason for believing 
that there would have been an incarnation of God such 
as we behold in the life and work of Christ, even if man 
had never sinned ? 

The question may seem, at first sight, an idle one. 
Why speculate, it may be asked, about what might, or 
probably would have been, if the moral history of the 
| world had been utterly different from what it has been? 
| It is not strange that to many the question has seemed 
useless, if not positively presumptuous. Moreover, is 
it not answered and settled for us by explicit scriptural 
teaching? Did not Christ define the purpose of his com- 
| ing as the seeking and saving of the lost? Does not 
| Paul clearly teach that the object of our Lord’s appear- 
ance was that men might be redeemed from the curse pro- 
‘nounced by the law upon sin, and receive the adoption of 
sons (Gal. iv. 4), and does not John say explicitly that 
| God sent his Son that men might not perish in sin, but 
| obtain eternal life (Jn. iii. 16)? For the reasons here 
suggested the common view has been that the incarna- ~ 
tion was conditioned solely upon the fact of human, sin. 
|| “Scripture,” says Dr. Denney, “dwells on the fact that 
Christ came into the world to save sinners, and never gives 
the faintest hint of any opening” in favor of the view that 


the incarnation was “included in the original design of 
357 




























lines.” 4 

On the other hand, not a few theologians in the ez 
ages of the Church, and a large number of modern s 
ars, are of opinion that there are both biblical and spec 
lative considerations which strongly favor the view # 
the work of Christ is a part of the divine plan of # 
world and has therefore a meaning and purpose which a 
not exhausted in the rescue of man from evil — that, 
short, we may well believe that Christ would have cor 
even if man had never sinned at all This theory do 
not call in question the truth, but only maintains # 
inadequacy, of the common view. It contends, not ic 
contrary, but for a wider, conception of the incarnatic 
“It is not possible on reflection,” writes Bishop Westec 
“to exclude all other conceptions from the incarnati 
except those of satisfaction and atonement. We mt 
look to the perfection and not only to the redemptio 
man. We cannot conceive that a being capable of kne 
ing God and of being united with him should not hi 
been destined to gain that knowledge, to realize t 
union. We cannot suppose that the consummation 
man and of humanity and the realization of Christ’s Ky 


are dependent on the fall; we cannot suppose that th 
could have been brought about in any other way than 
that according to which they are now revealed to us 
their supreme glory.” 

On the question whether any of the New Testa 
writers adopted, or even approximated, any such cone 
tion as this, we have seen that the most opposite juc 


1 Studies in Theology, pp. 100, 101. For the opposite opinion tl 
“certain passages of Scripture do necessarily suggest a wider view,’ 
Orr’s The Christian View of God and the World, pp. 319-322. 

2 For the history of this view down to the Reformation era see W 
cott’s essay on The Gospel of Creation in his commentary on the Epis' 
of St. John. Among modern representatives of the theory in que i 
may be mentioned Bishops Lightfoot, Westcott, and Martensen 7 
Drs. Dorner, Rothe, Van Oosterzee, and Orr. 

3 Op. cit., pp. 324, 325. 

































THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO MANKIND 359 


ments are pronounced. That there should have been any 
licit treatment of such a problem in the primitive 
reh was, of course, not to be expected. The question 
whether the more speculative thinkers of the first age, 
men like Paul and John, developed their thoughts in the 
direction of such a view or theory. It appears to me that 
Paul’s teaching concerning the cosmic significance of 
Christ moves distinctly in this direction. He sees in 
Christ God’s coefficient in the creation and administration 
of the world; through him and for him all things have 
_been created ; his work seems to be regarded as the 
realization of God’s eternal world-plan (Col. i. 15-18; 
2 ili. 9-11). Now whether these thoughts be taken in 
., realistic sense or be regarded as presenting an 
al picture of the historic Redeemer, — in either case 
Jhrist’s work is correlated with God’s eternal purpose for 
the world, and not merely with the fact of sin. The pas- 
sages are certainly adapted to suggest the conception that 
Christ’s saving mission was the completion of the ideal 
rid-order, whose most obvious and immediate aim, 
= was the rescue of mankind from evil, but whose 
whole meaning and purpose are not exhausted in that 
spect of it. If sin is incidental to humanity, if it does 
belong to man as such, how can it be regarded as 
nishing the whole occasion of God’s supreme revelation 
himself ? 
. “Tt may, indeed, be held, as Dr. Orr says the “ ultra- 
a. would hold, that sin itself is positively included 
in God’s eternal purpose, that its existence in the world 
not merely foreseen or permitted, but foreordained. In 
case, sin is doubtless as real a part of the world-plan 
as Christ is, and may still be regarded as expressing the 
whole occasion of his historic mission. But the difficul- 
ies of this view are not inconsiderable. They are such 
these: Why, then, is not God himself responsible for 
he existence of sin, and how should man be to blame 
or it? and, Is not sin, in that case, an element in the 
ake of the world, a metaphysical imperfection implanted 
m the very constitution of humanity? Whatever infer- 





360 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRII 70) 


















ences on this point the principles of Calvin may requir 
it seems to me quite evident that the Christian view 
God and the world does not include the opinion that s 
was a part of the original divine plan of the system. 
conception, then, is hardly available as a means of reft 
ing the view in question of Christ’s revealing and perfee 
ing work. 

Again: the Fourth Gospel sees in Christ the Logos, 
creative reason of God, the eternal principle of the wor 
order. Apart from this creative Word nothing was made 
that has been made (Jn. i. 3). From the beginning 
the world the light of life which was in the Logos h 
been shining down into the darkness of the world’s i 
rance and sin, illumining the mind of each individual man 
(Jn. i. 9). This writer, therefore, sees a work of Chri 
implicit in creation itself —a revealing and saving wot 
which is conterminous with the history of the race. He 
too, the point under consideration is independent of f 
judgment which one may form respecting the source of 
these ideas or the nature of the preéxistence which 
predicated of Christ. The passages cannot mean less thi 
that Christ and his work were embraced in the ideal worl 
order ; they do certainly illustrate the effort of Christi 
speculation to correlate Christ with creation itself and‘ 
define a meaning in his work which shall make it as eo 
prehensive as the needs and possibilities of mankind. 

Quite in accordance with these ideas we find that the 
Johannine writings define the purpose of Christ’s coming 
in a broader way than does the theory which holds th 
the one occasion of it is the rescue of man from sin. 
is the light of the world; he comes to shine upon t 
minds of men, to reveal God to them, to bear witness t0 
the truth concerning his nature and requirements. The 
writings speak quite as much of revelation as of redem 
tion through Christ. Now, can we suppose that, evé 
apart from sin, there would have been no occasion for the 
rising of this heavenly light upon our world ; that ma 
kind would not have needed to receive of his fulness ; 
his interpretation of God to man in terms of human li 


‘ eee 


Pe 
b 
THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO MANKIND 361 


would not have been needful? We are, indeed, quite 
powerless to state what might have been in other cdndi- 
tions, but I think we can say with considerable confidence, 
that the supposition that the work of Christ was condi- 
. tioned solely upon sin and unnecessary apart from it, fails 
| to rise to the point of view of Pauland John. To me it 
“seems inadequate to the demands of any form of specula- 
_tion which sees in Christ something more than a repairer 
_ or restorer and regards him as the realization of the divine 
ideal of humanity. 

_ These considerations serve to bring before us the imme- 
diate subject of the present chapter : The Relation of 
Christ to Mankind. I assume that in making any effort 
to deal with it we must keep on the ground of historic fact. 
‘It will hardly be found useful to make any attempt to ac- 
| company those theologians who mount at once into the 
‘upper air and bring back such announcements as that 
Christ is the root or the sum of humanity or the principle 
‘of mental interaction or logical induction. For my part 
‘I find it more interesting to pursue the inquiry : How did 
Jesus himself conceive his relation to our humanity and 
'what impression concerning that relation did he make 
| upon those among whom he lived on earth? If we could 
even partially answer these questions, the result might 
| throw some light upon the saving mission of Christ. \ What 
I shall attempt, then, will be to draw from the Saspel 
portrait of Jesus a few general inferences which will serve 
|? show how he truly is the Saviour of mankind. 

We must, first of all, recur to a point already noted in 
another connection, namely, that Christ cherished for the 
‘human race a feeling so singularly fraternal that it has 
won for him the peerless title of the Brother of his fellow- 
men. He subsumed the narrower relations of kinship 
into those of universal brotherhood. Looking upon a 
| multitude who sat about him he could say : “ Behold my 
|mother and my brethren.” Nor did he merely say this! 
He lived and acted precisely as if every person was un- 
speakably dear to him ; the lowliest and humblest could 
| not have been more precious in his sight, if they had been 















362 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


his closest kindred and companions. Heso identified hir 
self with men as to make their interest his interest. / F 
was the perfect Lover of mankind. . 
* accordingly sought the well-being of all iene E 
despised none, despaired of none.1- He found somethin 
good even in moral outcasts and was often able to fan thi 
spark of goodness into flame. He draws from the tax 
gatherer. Zacchzeus a great confession whereby he proy 
himself a true son of Abraham. He wins the confiden 
of the Roman centurion in whose nobility and generosit 
he can see a faith not matched in all Israel. His p 
quickens in the robber at his side on the cross a vagt 
yearning to share in the Kingdom of righteousness and 
is promised the fellowship of Christ in Paradise. He w 
the friend of publicans and sinners, not from any person: 
preference or class-feeling, but because his love and syr 
pathy flowed most freely where men were neediest. H 
was equally ready and anxious to be a friend of Serib 
and Pharisees if only they would have him for a frien 
He estimated men not for what they were at the momer 
but for what they were desirous and capable of becomin 
Aspiration, not present achievement, was for him the ch 
test of character. Not those who count themselves alreac 
righteous and believe that they need no repentance, b 
those who hunger and thirst after righteousness sh 
receive the blessing which he promises. He who receiy 
into his favor and friendship a righteous man because 
zs righteous shall have the reward of the goodness wh 
he admires. Such is Jesus’ generous estimate of me 
Not what they are, but what they would like to be — the 
is the truest test and measure of them. Hence he cou 
gain no point of contact with the self-righteous. Ff 
found none so helpless and hopeless as those who we 
satisfied to remain as they were. But his love and sy 
pathy were not on that account less inclusive. Jesus Wi 
tlre Friend of man. 
is interest in men related to the moral life) He cc 
cerned himself with God’s Kingdom and righteousnes 






1 Cf. Lk, vi. 35, R. V. marg.: ‘‘ despairing of no man. ” 


a THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO MANKIND 363 
He was the supreme Prophet of the soul. True, he never 
| displayed an ascetic contempt for the world and the 
natural life of man. He mingled with his fellows at their 
feasts, in their work, and in their sorrows. He was no 
austere despiser of life’s joys. Unlike his predecessor, 
| John, he “came eating and drinking,” and by his whole 
I eareer he sanctioned a wholesome, active, normal life. 
_He was in no sense an eccentric or lawless person. 
_ Nevertheless, the whole emphasis of his thought and work 
was on the inner life. He saw that the meaning and 
yalue of life hinge upon motives and principles which 
| rule within and that the world is therefore what we make 
it. The Kingdom of God comes in the world in proportion 
|| as it comes in the hearts of men. Out of the aims and 
purposes which rule the inner life spring the good or the 
evil which build or wreck human happiness and hope. 
The pure in heart see God, for the pure heart is the eye. 
Such were some of the ways in which Jesus brought out 
the primacy of the moral life. To this truth he was 
absolutely committed. He staked everything upon it. 
In the power of it he consecrated himself to his work. 
To assert it and make it prevail in the minds and hearts 
ies. he taught and labored and died. 








Jesus believed implicitly in the triumph of meekness, 
gentleness, and love.) He knew that the greatest powers 
on earth were not swords and armies. Despite the long 
history of human strife and bloodshed, despite the sad 
story of man’s inhumanity to man, Jesus knew that there 
was a power in suffering love which could conquer even 

human malignity and that the forces of evil must at last 
break themselves upon his divine patience. “The meek 
shall inherit the earth,” he dared to declare. In spite of 
the seeming dominion of ambition and force, it is, after 
all, humility and patience which really subdue the hearts 
of men. To this principle of the real royalty of meek- 
ness and love Jesus Christ committed himself absolutely, 
in life and in death. He knew that the Kingdom of God, 
| founded not on might, but on humility, service, and help- 
fulness, must yet give the law to all kingdoms and that 
















364 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


this Kingdom, secure as the throne of the eternal Loy 
would endure and flourish when all others had vanishe 
from the earth. 

It will doubtless seem trite for me to remind the reade 
that Jesus realized here in our world the ideal of huma 
perfection, All Christians know and confess this, but i 
does not follow that we understand it because we hay 
frequently heard it mentioned. I venture to think tha 
when we have fully pondered this amazing fact, we shal 
not lightly esteem its saving significance. This perfectio: 
is, doubtless, a presupposition of his Saviourhood in ou 
technical explanations, but it hardly ranks in traditiona 
theology as itself a power of God unto salvation. 
holds no prominent place in the historic theories. It i 
indeed, relatively depreciated as signifying nothing but 
good example which is deemed to be a matter of sligh 
consequence in comparison with an act of homage to God 
government or a vicarious experience of penal woe. 
will not reargue the questions involved in these thoouidl 
it must rest with each person to see the value and powe 
of Christ’s work in such aspects of it as he can clothe wit 
saving significance. If he conceives that God was oblige 
by his law or by some one of his attributes to mete out 
certain amount of suffering for human sin, and that Chri 
has endured that suffering in his stead so that he ca 
escape it, then he will see his salvation in a penal sub 
stitution. It would not seem, in that case, to be essentiiz 
to lay muchstress on the kind of life Christ lived. Enougl 
that his death was efficacious ; that since salvation is ai 
escape from penalty, he has provided the way of escapi 
from it by enduring it for us. 

I apprehend, however, that most persons who derive thei 
ideas from the Gospels rather than from dogmatic system 
will find more meaning and saving power in that peerles 
life, full of humanity, full of divinity, than in sue 
theoretic “plans of salvation.” A perfect life is not 
trifling phenomenon in human history. The mora 
influence of Jesus Christ in the world seems to me not té 
have been duly estimated by those who characterize it 


' 
ye 


¥ THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO MANKIND 365 


such terms as ‘“‘mere example.” A purity like his could 
not come into our world without purifying. Such a life 
Joes not fail to reveal to men their sins ; nor does it fail 
to honor and exalt the divine holiness and to show that 
she sinner can never be blessed in his sins. Such a life is 
tself a realization of God’s holy love among men; it is 
joliness incarnate. It asserts, magnifies, and vindicates 
1oliness not alone or mainly by any one thing it does or 
‘xperiences, but chiefly by whatitis. If yousay : Christ 
1onored the divine holiness in his death, I say far more : 
de honored it in all that he ever said, did, experienced, 
md was. If yousay: Christ condemned sin on the cross, 
_agree, but go much further: He condemned it in his 
ey thought, word, and deed. If you say that Christ’s 
Toss is saving and his blood life-giving, I agree, for his 
ross is the symbol of undeserved suffering and self-effac- 
he love, and his blood is the life which he gave because he 
rave himself for us. If God was in Christ, fulfilling in 
im the ideal of humanity, I submit that we should seek 
jis saving value not alone in some isolated act or experi- 
nee, however significant, but in his life and work as a 
‘rhole. It is Christ himself, and no one single deed or 
/xperience, that is the full power of God unto salvation. 

| hrist realized the life of perfect union with God. 
| nlike other men, he had no sense of estrangement between 
imself and the Father. He never felt the divine require- 
Nee as a burden or regarded them as the demands of a 
ca Power. ‘The will of God was not only his law but 
jis delight. “Not my will, but thine, be done” is the 
3 which best sums up the inner life of Jesus. There 
ws lived on earth one man who was absolutely sure of 
|'od and who was perfectly at home in God’s world. His 
the life of the true and loyal son in his Father’s house. 
lie is haunted by no fear, perplexed by no doubt, dis- 
jaieted by no misgiving. In peace and confidence he 
nds his strength. The sense of God’s presence was the 
Pty breath of his life. In him we behold humanity in 
erfect union with God. 

|The significance of such a life in our world cannot, I 













366 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINI 



















think, be exaggerated. What is the destiny of man 
not to realize his union with God — to live in God’s wor 
not as a slave or outlaw, but as a son? What now 
there has lived among us One who has perfectly achie 
this life of sonship — who has lived in such fellowship wi 
God that he can truly say and show that no one knows 1 
Father except him to whom he reveals him. Can we oy 
state the value and power of such a personality and su 
a life? Call him by what names you will; say he is G 
manifest or humanity deified; frame what explanations 
his mystery you please, — his proper names are Jesus, § 
iour — Christ, the Anointed —the Word, the Revealer 
God — the Son of God, the chosen Agent of God in d 
closing his will and his nature. Let theories of Chri 
person be what they may, he can never lose his place 
power if it is true that he has lived on earth the ideal 
of fellowship with God. That in itself is a fact so am 
ing, so transcendent, that no dignities or prerogatives ¥ 
which he could be clothed can exaggerate its importa 
If Christ has lived the perfect life of sonship to God ame 
men, we need ask nomore. This fact alone constitutes h 
Saviour and Lord. All conceivable saving acts and poy 
are implicit in it. Let men heap upon him all the tit 
which reverence and adoring love can invent. They’ 
never say of him anything really greater than that he re 
ized in our humanity the perfectly Godlike life — that 
him we see man at one with God. . 

n Christ we see also the universal man.) He was a 
by birth and education. He lived and labored among Je 
He respected their customs and obeyed their laws. 
was a loyal and obedient citizen of the country in wh 
he lived. But of Jewish peculiarities and prejudices 
find nothing whatever in him. His character was 
sense local or national. His sympathies were in no deg 
limited by boundaries of country or limits of time. 
were as wide as the race — as wide as the interests, need 
and sins of mankind. Thus in Christ we see realized 
ideal of common, universal humanity. He was confor! 
to the type of social and religious life which belong 





























oo 
~l 


THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO MANKIND 3 


he age and country in which he lived; but his life was 
10 way restricted or narrowed by these. It is evident 
they were incidental to his life, and not at all the meas- 
it. His outlook on the world was too wide, and his 


t into human life too deep, to allow him to set his 


The interpretation of Jesus’ self-designation, “Son of 
which derives from it the meaning: the ideal man 
e man to whom nothing human is foreign — is, doubt- 
historically unwarranted. Still, the messianic mean- 
of the title very naturally suggests some such idea, 
sh is, in any case, true and important in itself. He 
ame to rescue man to his true life as a son of God 
profoundly concerned for every real interest of human- 
_ All specific acts and duties were regarded by him 
aving their significance and value in their bearing upon 
welfare of mankind. Rules, ceremonies, and institu- 
sare valuable if they promote the moral interests of 
3 they are worse than valueless if they become the ends 
hich man is but a means and are thereby made to cramp 
belittle human life. They are all well and useful so 
+ as they help men forward, but when they are made 
in themselves, then they become fetters on the human 
t and hindrances to the greater things — judgment, 
, and the love of God. Your venerated Sabbath, 
d Jesus to his contemporaries, has ceased to be your 
ant and has become your master; this is an inversion 
le true order; the Sabbath was made on man’s account, 
an on the Sabbath’s account. This is a typical ex- 
of Jesus’ attitude. His great concern was for men. 
w and estimated all that was local, temporary, and 
mtal in the light of what was permanent, essential, 
nely human, and universally true. 

the foregoing statements are founded in historical 
it follows that in Jesus Christ we see humanity 
climax; he is the typical, representative man. His 
ad work must also partake in that representative 
er. His relation te mankind is such that in his 


/ 


. see revealed the true law of life for all men. We ar 


d 


~ 


























368 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DO 
career and characteristic acts and experiences we ar 


see in him, as did the Apostle Paul, the Head and Four 
of a new spiritual humanity ; ; his life is the perfect 
of all Godlike life; he is the Captain of our salvation. 
leader in whose steps we must follow. There must, t 
it would seem, be some sense in which we must pos 
ourselves of his secret, repeat in ourselves his experi 
live over again his life. This is a mode of thought w 
is certainly suggested by the conception of Christ as 
representative, typical man. It has had but slight 
nition, as Professor Candlish points out (see page 28 
the dogmatic theories of atonement. Sometimes it 
been admitted as a corollary or pendant of the ide 
judicial substitution ; sometimes it has been transfe 
into a metaphysical theory of the universe and in 
form has been thought to supply a philosophical basi 
the idea of vicarious suffering ; but, more commonk 
has been entirely neglected in traditional dogmaties 
sometimes positively disparaged as opening the way 
mysticism in which there is held to be nothing profo 
except profound misunderstanding and confusion. 
It is undeniable, however, that the idea in question 
a prominent place in the New Testament. Our Lord 
clared that his disciples must take up the cross and fol 
after him. He evidently regarded the cross as a syn 
of what others, as well as himself, must do and experi 
and not merely as denoting a service which he should 
form for them. The Johannine tradition reports hi 
expressing the law of his own life thus: “ Except ag 
of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth byi 
alone; but if it die, it beareth much fruit” (Jn. xii. 
But was this the law of his own life only, or of all ¢ 
like life? It is clear that it is regarded as a uniy 
law which was typically illustrated in Christ’s life 
death. The discourse continues: It is he who give 
life that saves it; if a man will be my servant, le 
follow me. Again, he tells us that for the sake of ot 
he consecrates himself to his life-work that they m 


THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO MANKIND 369 












‘onsecrated in truth. Consecrated to what? Obviously 
‘o the same true life to which he is devoting himself. 
The “truth” in which they are to live is the same as 
hat in which he is living — the truth of a Godlike devo- 
ion, service, and self-giving. Beyond question the author 
f the Gospel understood such teaching to mean that we 
ust follow Christ in such self-giving, for he elsewhere 
yrites: “Hereby know we love, because he laid down 
is life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for 
e brethren” (1 Jn. iii. 16). His is the pattern-life. 
Jurs must be run in the same mould. 
We instinctively feel, however, that such figures, drawn 
om the resemblance and relations of external objects, are 
nadequate. We want to express something more than 
opying a pattern, following in another’s footsteps; even 
e term “imitation of Christ” does not wholly satisfy 
s. It is for this reason, perhaps, that religious thought 
as sought a terminology which should more strongly 
| phasize the idea of a close personal relation to Christ, 
he oneness of the believer’s life with his. The Christian 
rho contemplates the life and life-work of Christ repre- 
entatively feels that all true life must be of the same 
ind with his—that the Godlike life in all men must be 
Lgentially the same as it was in the pattern-man; hence 
€ conceives his salvation as consisting in life-union with 
Yhrist; he lives in Christ and Christ in him. In this 
‘eciprocal indwelling salvation is realized. 
Now among all the New Testament writers it is Paul 
ho has most graphically portrayed the Christian life 
om this point of view. It is, perhaps, the most char- 
cteristic thing in the apostle’s teaching concerning salva- 
jon. The forensic features of his exposition were to 
ave been expected. The wonder is not that he employs 
ridical conceptions in construing the work of Christ 
din depicting the believer’s appropriation of its bene- 
ts; the wonder is rather that he has so far transcended 
1 legal modes of thought and expounded his doctrine 
salvation in the vital terms of personal relationship. 
et us place together some of the most characteristic 














3870 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTR I 


expressions of Paul’s idea that salvation is reali 
repeating Christ’s experience and sharing his life: ‘ 
we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were bapt 
into his death. We were buried therefore with 
through baptism into death; that like as Christ 
raised from the dead through the glory of the Fathe 
we also might walk in newness of life.” “If we ¢ 
with Christ we believe that we shall also live with hi 
“Even so reckon ye yourselves to be dead unto sin, 
alive unto God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. vi. 3, 4, 8, 
“One died for all, therefore all died” (2 Cor. y. 
“For ye died and your life is hid with Christ in G 
(Col. iii. 3). “If ye died with Christ from the rudim 
of the world,” ete. (Col. ii. 20). “If ye were raisec 
gether with Christ, seek the things which are abe 
(Col. ili. 1). “God quickened us together with Cl 
and raised us up with him, and made us to sit with 
in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus ” (Eph. ii. 5, 
“T have been crucified with Christ; yet I live; and 
no longer I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. ii. 
“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, an¢ 


Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is 
Church” (Col. i. 24). 

The believer, then, according to Paul, dies with Ch 
is buried with him, rises with him from his grave in 
newness of life like his own, and sits down with hi 
the heavenly place. He repeats the experience of Cl 
in his death, burial, and resurrection; or, in yet o 
words, he fills out the sufferings of Christ which 
remain to be completed. I venture to say that thi: 
the boldest, most novel, and original theory of salvyat 
which has ever been advanced. It is not strange t 
theology has not known how to make any use of it 
has, therefore, for the most part, entirely ignored it. 
one of the traditional theories employs its terminolo 
into none of the legalist schemes can it be made to 
It lends itself to the support of no plan of substitut 
equivalence or imputation. It has a strange, myst 



































THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO MANKIND 371 


d which makes it seem vague and hazy in comparison 
bh the clear and definite conception of Christ as step- 
: into our place, paying our debt of penalty and so 
mpting us. It is strangely incongruous with all the 
brite watchwords of back debts, vicarious payments, 
tituted punishments, and merit-treasuries. So obvi- 
ly is it intended to describe something that happens 
pur experience, analogous, at least, to what Christ 
erienced, that it is hard to adjust it to the notion 
£ a satisfaction rendered to God “ wholly outside of 
= The truth is that we have here in Paul himself, 
alleged chief authority for a Christianized legalism, 
jode of viewing Christ and his salvation which that 
galism does not know how to appropriate. One can 
mos imagine that its defenders would brand this mysti- 
a of the apostle, or whatever it is, as profound only in 
fs Misunderstandings, were it not for their wholesome 
fread of “talking down to St. Paul.” 
Do not these bold assertions of the apostle become 
felligible if we regard Christ as the typical, represent- 
fe man? If we hold with Paul that Christ is the 


nd ideally is, then may we not also dare to hold with 
mm that we must, in principle, repeat his life and death 
nd resurrection in ourselves in order to realize his sal- 
ation Must we not tread the path which he trod? 
Must we not “patient bear his cross” with him, die with 
‘im to sin upon it, be buried out of sight of the sinful 

eid, and rise with him into the heights of his own 

mess? Must we not realize the true, Godlike life in 
Same way in which Christ realized it? If he is the 
ern-way, must we not walkin it? If he is the perfect 
f€, Must we not share init? If salvation is sonship to 
L if it consists in a life “ new-charactered in Christ,” 
Bushnell used to say, then surely it must be realized 
the same principles and in the same way in which the 
ptain of our salvation was made perfect (Heb. ii. 10). 
anetified and sanctifier are one. He is not ashamed to 
all them brethren. They tread the same path and as 


372 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 


they together come before God’s throne, his gracious w 
is: “Behold, I and the children which God hoe oi 
me” (Heb. ii. 13). 

These citations from the Epistle to the Hebverll 
typical illustrations of its conception of the represei 
tive humanity of Christ. He went before us in the en 
ance of whatever sufferings fidelity to one’s vocation 
involve. If occasion require, we must “go forth unto] 
without the camp, bearing his reproach” (Heb. xiii. 1 
Sharing our humanity (Heb. ii. 14), suffering thro 
temptation (Heb. ii. 18; iv. 15), learning obedience by 
sufferings (Heb. v. 8), and exercising through all hi 
perience that perfect trust in God in which we must 
find confidence and strength (Heb. ii. 13; xii. 2), he 
livers us from our bondage to fear (Heb. ii. 15), fill 
with hope and joyous confidence in God (Heb. i 
vi. 18-20), and thus becomes to his obedient follo 
the author of eternal salvation (Heb. v. 9). In the 
of perfect trust, hope, purity, and self-sacrifice Jest 
the forerunner (spédpopos, vi. 20) and leader (apy 
ii. 10; xii. 2), and hence the finisher or perf 
(TeXevwTHs, xii. 2) of our trust and hope. In no 
writing of the New Testament is stronger empl 
placed upon the zmitatio Christi than in this Ep 
Christ has lived the pattern-life; we must repeat 
experience. Our obedience, our trust, our union * 
God, must be realized in essentially the same ways as 
his. Our life must be of the same kind with his 
must be built upon the same principles, fortified 
inspired by the same motives, and directed to the §s 
ends. Far as he is above and beyond us, he is 
thereby removed from all relation to us. That we sh 
be told to live as he did is no idle mockery of our w 
ness. Every act of self-giving, every patient endur 
of suffering, every triumph in temptation, is, so ar 
achievement in the kind of life Christ lived. FE 
step on the path of duty and goodness, however sI 
is an approximation toward the perfect life. 

The question now arises: From the standpoint of 





' 
7 THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO MANKIND 373 
representative relation of Christ to humanity, what signifi- 
cance would attach to his death? What could be the pos- 
‘sible meaning of the apostle’s saying that when Christ 
died, all died (2 Cor. v.14)? Or, in what sense could 
he have conceived that Christ “died for all, that they 
which live should no longer live unto themselves” 
(2 Cor. v. 15)? Such expressions seem to me to be based 
‘on the conception of a moral identification of men with 
Christ in which their salvation is realized. They must so 
really live over again his typical experiences that they 
may be said to die to sin on his cross and to rise with him 
into a newness of life. It may be thought that such lan- 
guage involves only a comparison between Christ’s death 
and resurrection and the believer’s ethical death to sin 
and his rising into a holy life; but it is noticeable that 
the language of the apostle is prevailingly not that of 
comparison but that of identification. It is obvious, of 
course, that an identification im time cannot be intended ; 
the salvation of all men was not actually realized in and 
with Christ’s death and resurrection. But in principle 
alvation for all was thus realized. The cross is the sym- 
‘bol of absolute devotion to God’s will and of perfect love 
jand self-giving. Every man who would attain to salva- 
ion in Christ must attain it by way of the cross; he must 
ake up Christ’s cross of sacrifice and make it his very 
own. He must be crucified with Christ, as Paul said 
he had been. The death of Christ is the culmination 
f a career of suffering in self-giving; it is the symbol of 
he profoundest pity and yearning love for men and of 
utter self-commitment to God; its meaning is expressed 
ith the Sufferer’s expiring breath in such words as: 
‘Father, forgive them ” and “Into thy hands I commend 
y spirit.” The man who will be saved must die a similar 
eath. He must die to self that he may live unto God. 
|He must, in the realistic language of the Fourth Gospel, 
feat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ if he would 
ave life. The life of the truly saved man must be, as 
. Bushnell expressed it, a Christ-ed life. 

“Theology has commonly seen in such expressions the 

























wa 






































374 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DO 


idea that we must believe in the sufficiency of a substi 
tionary expiation wrought for us on the cross, or m 
receive Christ in the bread and wine of the euchari 
J fear that these interpretations make salvation too ea 
If it can be shown that my dues have been paid by anoth 
it does not seem to be any great moral achievement for 1 
to accept the arrangement and to be glad to appropriate i 
advantages. If I can receive Christ and his salvation 
a morsel of bread, the requirement seems simple and eas 
accomplished. * But if I must learn what Christ’s im 
life means; if I must view his death asa self-giving wh 
I must repeat in my own heart and life ; if I must see 
his cross a crucifixion of all selfishness and sin, then sal 
tion seems to me the most real and the most stupend 


any conception.) So, I believe, Paul and John and Chi 
himself conceived it, and this conception as presente¢ 
the New Testament, so far from being merely inciden 
illustrative, or subordinate to the notion of an exter 
saving act, is the very heart and soul of the biblical ¢ 
trine of salvation. Be the expiatory expressions of P 
and of the writer to the Hebrews what they may, they 
from the thought-world of late Judaism; but the exp 
tion, by both writers, of the actual realization of salvat 
is a transcript of moral experience and is presented in tel 
expressive of moral participation in the inner life of Je 
the reproduction in the believer of the representa 
humanity of Christ. . 

If this idea is, as I believe, the most characteristic 1 
in the New Testament doctrine concerning salvation, i 
equally the most profound and morally exacting concept 
of the subject. ‘* The modern mind ” may, indeed, neg 
or repudiate it because it is too high and difficult, bu 
can never bring against it the objections which it fee 
theories of external substitution, namely, that they are 
once morally unreal and rationally impossible. I hi 


by Christian teachers : Granted that the moral inte r 
tation is the more adequate and satisfying, do we not 


THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO MANKIND 370 


need to use, for popular purposes, the terms descriptive of 
an external substitution? Are not men more likely to 
be moved by the idea that some one has borne their burden 


of guilt and penalty than by the idea that one has come to 


realize in our midst, and to introduce us into, the life of 
sonship to God? To many popular religious teachers 
this seems to be the case. Some theologians even are of 
the same opinion; hence their efforts still to commend 


to the men of our time some form of external substitution 


which seems to them acceptable. I cannot help thinking 


_ that these efforts are misplaced. I do not know to what 





- extent the apparatus of externalism, realistically presented, 


may prove effective in evangelistic efforts among people 
unused to reflection; but so far as my observation has 
extended, it leads me to say that among thoughtful lay- 
men, quite as much as in theological circles, the notions of 
substitution, expiation, vicarious penalty, and the like, are 
“unacceptable and obsolescent. 
To all this the theological pessimist may answer : ‘Too 
true; but the fact only shows the degeneracy of the 


| times.” Dr. Hodge, as we have seen, regarded the idea of 


penal substitution as so fundamental in the whole scrip- 
tural view of Christ’s death, —as constituting the very 
substance of the biblical doctrine of salvation to such an 
extent that those who called it in question were to be re- 


| garded, either as not Christians at all or as_ perversely 


-wresting the plain assertions of Scripture into accord with 


| their personal prejudices.! I apprehend that few pres- 
| ent-day theologians, however predisposed in favor of the 
| seventeenth century, would go quite so far as this. Does 
| the change mean progress or retrogression? On this 


question the reader must form his own judgment. 

It is only incidental to my present purpose, however, to 
inquire what opinions are most acceptable or prevalent 
||among various classes of persons. I am primarily con- 
cerned only with an effort to determine what is most cen- 
‘tral and characteristic in the Christian view of the subject. 
| Apropos of this effort, however, I suggest to the reader to 


1 Systematic Theology, I. 479. 


CE 





8376 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DO 






bear in mind this question and to put it to the test o' 
observation: What view of Christ’s saving work 
fullest recognition and attestation in the Christian cc 
sciousness and experience of men? To what concepti 
of the nature and method of salvation do men bear witn 
as being, for their minds and consciences, the highest, t 
truest, the most real and vital ? 














CHAPTER VII 
THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO HUMAN SIN 


WHat is the relation of the sufferings and death of 
Jesus to human sin — its guilt, its penalty, its forgiveness ? 
Did he assume its guilt and bear its penalty in order to 
secure its remission? Was his death a substitute for sin’s 
punishment and so a means of creating a basis for forgive- 
ness? Was his bitter anguish a reparation to God whereby 
his punitive anger was satisfied and the hindrance to the 
operation of his grace removed? All these questions are 
answered in the affirmative by the traditional theories, 


_ though with the most various explanations of the sense in 


which such assertions can be true. 

All theories which hold that the death of Christ is the 
ground of forgiveness meet a difficulty not easily explained 
in the fact that in the Old Testament God is uniformly 
represented as a gracious God, willing and eager to forgive 
the sins of men. The writings of the prophets ring with 
the proclamation of a free forgiveness to all who truly 


_ Yepent: “As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure 
_ in the death of the wicked ; but that the wicked turn from 


his way and live ;” “If the wicked turn from all his sins 
that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes and do 


_ that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he 
shall not die” (Hzek. xxxiii. 11; xviii. 21). 


Now there are two ways in which this difficulty is met. 


On the one hand, it is said that these assurances presup- 


pose the expiation of sin accomplished by the sacrifices. 
But the obstacles to the success of this explanation are 
very great. They are such as these: (1) The prophets 
do not recognize the sacrifices as being at all necessary 


_ to reconciliation with God. As we have already seen 


B77 



















378 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


(pp- 17, 18), they set no very high estimate upon the Levit- 
ical ritual and never consider the offerings essential to 
obtaining God’s forgiveness. Their spirit is well reflected 
in the words of that classic confession of sin in Ps. li 
16, 17: — 


« For thou delightest not in sacrifice ; else would I give it: 
Thou hast no pleasure in burnt offering. 
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: : 
A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” 


Moreover, (2) sacrifices were allowed, in general, only 
for sins of inadvertence. For wilful crimes like murder 
and adultery no atonement by sacrifice was available 
(Num. xxxv. 81; Lev. xx. 10). Were such sins, then 
utterly unforgivable? They must have been so if sae \- 
fice was the ground of forgiveness. But how, in that e 
could the author of Psalm li. rejoice in God’s mercy am 
forgiveness, and how could Nathan assure David of 
divine forgiveness for his twofold crime of murder and 
adultery? The fact that there was forgiveness for sin 
for which no offering was accepted, is proof positive that 
in the view which prevails in the Old Testament the real 
ground of forgiveness was the gracious disposition of God 

(3) The explanation in question encounters the further 
difficulty that the primary and fundamental idea of the 
offerings is not that of substitutionary punishment, but 
that of a gift or act of homage. The historical study o 
the institution of sacrifice has completely undermined th 
position in question. 4 

(4) The one book in the New Testament which largely 
uses sacrificial analogies by which to interpret the we rh 
of Christ —the Epistle to the Hebrews —is most explic! 
in asserting that animal offerings were only ineffective type 
and shadows which were powerless to accomplish recon 
ciliation with God, since “it is impossible that the blooe 
of bulls and goats should take away sins” (Heb. x. 4). 

But even if all these difficulties could be surmounted — 
if the sacrificial expiations associated with the Levi tica 
ritual were the basis of the prophetic proclamation of fre 




































“ff 


a - 
FHE RELATION OF CHRIST TO HUMAN SIN 379 


ess, all this would not only fail to prove that 
s death was the sole ground of forgiveness, but 
be inconsistent with that assertion; for if the 
al atonements may constitute a ground of forgive- 
certainly, that ground is not first laid by the 
hrist’s death. I conclude that the assertion, that 
s death is the ground of forgiveness, is irreconcil- 
th the known fact that God has always forgiven 
Der 4 a sinners, and that it cannot be formed with 
iform teaching of the Old Testament prophets that 
gives out of pure grace on one condition only — 
famee or reformation. 
janother explanation is sometimes advanced: When, 
id Testament times, forgiveness is offered freely, 
srently on condition of repentance only, it is assumed 
the penitent looks forward to the atonement which 
si is to make and is saved by an anticipatory faith in 
mieiliation of God to be accomplished in his death. 
imference from the proposition, that Christ’s death 
possibility of salvation, encounters the difficulty 
ther the Old Testament nor the New represents 
faith of the saints of the old covenant as consisting in 
5 enee Im an expiatory atonement yet to be made. 
faith a Abraham, the great typical example, is never 
scribed, not even by Paul. He believed God, says 
postle, and his believing was reckoned to him for 
ness (Rom. iv. 3). ‘His faith is uniformly repre- 
is a trust in a present divine promise and favor, in 
as trust in God, and on that condition alone he was 
m additional objection to the theory under review 
s from the conception that a saving deed can save in 
its accomplishment. If Christ’s death founded 
ality of forgiveness, then forgiveness was not 
before its occurrence. If it be said that salvation 
fist was by a retroactive effect of his death, then 
either that men were not really saved before 
were only waiting to be saved when he should 
ad die, or that the saving death is conceived not 
























as a definite historical event, but as a name for a princi 
or law in God’s nature and providence which has al: 
been operands, In this view the sacrifice of Chi 


whose action is conterminous with the life of sinful a 
needy humanity. It is obvious, however, that this in 
pretation carries us far beyond the bounds of the tra 
tional conception of the sense in which Christ’s dea 
procures the forgiveness of sins. 

To limit the saving work of Christ to his death on 
cross would exclude from salvation all men who liy 
and died before that event, as well as all who, in the 
turies that have since elapsed, have not heard of it a 
acknowledged it as the sole ground of their hope in Go 
mercy. Is it the biblical view that no persons outs 
this limited number, living during a few recent centuri 
have been saved? Some would answer: It is, inde 
true that Christ’s historic work on earth is the one o1 
ground of salvation, but it is also true that God’s me 
is not limited to that relatively small area of hun 
history which we call Christendom; the inevitable e 
clusion is that the grace of God in Christ will be offer 
in the next life to those who have had no adequate opp 
tunity to embrace it here. On this view one must a 
Were, then, the Old Testament saints really saved in th 
lifetime on earth or are they also to have the opportu 
to be saved in an intermediate state? The latter suppe 
tion would seem to me to be the unavoidable result of t 
argument. It is quite certain, however, that neither f 
Old Testament nor the New so conceives the matt 
But there is little occasion to discuss this solution, sin 
is energetically repudiated by most of those who ini 
upon the formula: Christ’s death is the sole ground 
forgiveness. I would suggest, however, that by t 
rejection of the theory aE Tuba probation, orthe dc 

casts away the most feasible method of supporting 
traditional formula above stated. But this sacrifice 
due, of course, to motives which arise in other quart 


future probation than with the rival theory of the 
al Christ.” 

























I must think, would not be so much used if its 
] issues were considered. The appalling conse- 
es which flow from such a conception, together with 
g desire to attain some more reasonable view of 
‘s saving mission, must constitute my excuse for 
og out some of the results to which the traditional 
s lead. If, as is commonly said, the death of 
removed the obstacle in the divine mind to the 
eness of sins and so founded the possibility of sal- 
it is not easy to see how there could have been 
on for any before the occurrence of that event, and 
ious trust in the efficacy of that saving deed is 
le condition of salvation, then all who have not 
_and accepted it, that is, by far the greater part of 
uman race, have been hopelessly lost. The antici- 
acceptance of it centuries in advance, the retro- 
effect of it, and the appropriation of its benefits in 
ermediate state— these are the principal ways of 
bg or mitigating the inevitable conclusion. The 
wo of these solutions give only partial relief, as 
are intended to provide only for the Old Testament 
; the third is more effective since it opens a door. of 
for the heathen; but orthodoxy, from Augustine 
ward, has looked with suspicion upon it and has com- 
repudiated it. 
e is another formula which is presumably intended 
imarize the same views as those above noted, namely, 
died our death.” We have already had occasion 
Dr. Denney’s predilection for this formula (pp. 194, 
15), which, unfortunately, is not accompanied by any 
erresponding disposition to explain it.1 We are left to 


T. VY. Tymms points out that while Dr. Denney never says ex- 
at Christ bore the penalty of our sins, he uses language which 




















382 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTR NI 


conjecture its intended meaning. Does it mean t 
Christ’s dying on the cross, the yielding up of his spi 
to God, took the place of our dying and exempted us fr 
expiring? One might infer this meaning from much 
the argument which is frequently used to support s 
propositions. For example: Paul believed that physi 
dissolution was a punishment for sin; now Christ came 
endure in our place the consequences of sin; therefore - 
death for us was a substitute for our dying; “he died ¢ 
death.” This would be intelligible and would seem te 
the import of much of the argumentation which proce 
upon the common Jewish theory (shared by Paul) t 
physical death was a punishment of sin. But we 
hardly suppose that this is meant, because it stands in 
obvious contradiction to the fact that death is no less” 
lot of mankind since Christ than before and comes to 
saints and sinners alike. If physical death is a ec 
quence of sin, it is demonstrable that Christ has 
“died our death” in the sense of exempting us from t 
particular penalty. 

We must, it would seem, seek for some other mean 
for the word “death” as used in this formula. Does 
perhaps, mean spiritual or eternal death, the loss of 
soul, the forfeiture of the true life? In that case 
meaning would seem to be that Christ experienced G 
condemnation in our stead. This might be held in eit 
of two ways, either (1) that he actually experienced 
wrath of God and the pains of hell, as the Reforma’ 
and post-Reformation theology commonly affirmed 
(2) that he experienced sufferings which were equival 
or adequate substitutes for man’s eternal condemnat 
In other words, he either suffered the penalty of sit 
suffered as if he were enduring its penalty. The for 
supposition lands us in the strict penal theory ; the la 


bilities, as sin fixed them, his own’’— words which, ‘if taken al 
might be explained in a variety of ways, and would not necessarily ¢ 
with the views of Anselm, Abelard, Luther, Calvin, Grotius, Edwé 
Crawford, Dale, or even McLeod Campbell.’? The Christian Ide 
Atonement, p. 453. : 


/some form of the rectoral or vice-penal theory. In 
e former case, “he died our (spiritual or eternal) death,” 
at is, experienced our punishment, and so exempted us 
om it. In the latter case, “he died our death” (in the 
e sense) ‘so to speak” — suffered as if he were dying 
i death — experienced that which (for the purposes of 
e divine administration) was equivalent to our death 
id which answered the requirements of the law equally 
ell. 
‘Inasmuch as it is often impossible to determine which 
{ these two widely differing meanings (if either) is 
tended by saying that “Christ died our death,” it is 
ficult to deal seriously in argument with an assertion 
ose interpretation must be so largely conjectural. If 
e former meaning is intended, then the formula in ques- 
on asserts that the innocent was punished in order that 
je guilty might go unpunished — that God’s condemna- 
on came upon Christ in order that having vented his 
ger upon the guiltless, he could refrain from venting 
‘upon the guilty. This seems to be the most natural 
eaning of the saying: “Christ died our death.” I will 
+ discuss the conclusion to which this interpretation 
ds. For those who can entertain such a conception 
cussion would be useless; for all others, it would be 
bedless. It seems to me that one who can adopt the 
inciple which underlies the penal theory of our Lord’s 
ferings—that God is so just that he cannot forgive 
e guilty until he has first punished the innocent — 
ereby renders himself inaccessible to all considerations 
equity and morality. 
It is probable that to most persons who would use the 
mula under review, or some other intended to convey 
le same idea, the meaning of it would be the far more 
gue and indefinite one mentioned above. “Christ died 
r death” “as it were,” or “so far as a sinless person 
ud.” He suffered as 7f dying our death; he endured 
ims equal to those ordained as penalties of our sins, or 
hot equal, yet answering the same purpose. He died 


THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO HUMAN SIN 383 








































itual) death. Apart from all questions of the poss 
of such a substitution and of the evidence for it, this 
ception is certainly more tolerable, from an ethical s 
point, than the other. It has the disadvantage, how 
of being far less clear and of leaving more ques 
unanswered. How, on the strictly retributive thee 
punishment, can God satisfy his wrath against si 
requiring from the innocent sufferings which are 
properly penal?. What can satisfy the appetite for 
ishment but punishment ? How can it be made to ap 
that sufferings which are not penal can answer the 
poses of those which are? Is it a justifiable use of y 
to say that “Christ died our death,” when the me 
is that he did not die our death, but experienced 1 
death suffering which is held to reveal God’s displea 
at sin as well as the dying of our death would have ¢ 
And then there remains the chief question of all: — 
proof can be given which is adequate to show that Cl 
death took the place of sin’s penalty or served the 
ends? Did Christ himself view his death in that li 
Is it reasonable to say that the death of the Holiest 
the same meaning or purpose as the death of the sit 
The governmental or quasi-penal interpretation © 
statement that “Christ died our death” falls far bh 
the penal interpretation in clearness and has little, if 
advantage over it in point of historical proof. My # 
of the genesis and persistence of governmentalism is 
it is the resultant of two forces: religious sympathy 
the underlying assumptions of the penal theory and et 
revulsion against the inevitable consequences of that thee 
The result of the latter has been a reaction agains 
notion of vicarious penalty, which has certainly p 
useful in the development of thought on the subject 
Christ’s salvation. The governmental interpretatio 
served well as a point of departure, and marks a 
of real progress in the ethicizing of the doctrine of 2 
ment, but it is singularly unsatisfactory if contemp 
as a finality, In itself the theory is singularly w 




























THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO HUMAN SIN 385 


| indefinite, particularly on the points of special diffi- 
lty and importance. After diligent and repeated read- 
of the recent expositions of the semi-penal theories, 
gm Dr. Dale onward, with the best intention of learning 
yhat sense they mean to say that Christ bore our 
ity or died our death, I have been forced to the con- 
asion that, aside from the more extreme forms of mysti- 
and semi-pantheistic speculation, the modern adherents 
the quasi-penal theories succeed best in wrapping them- 
lyes in an impenetrable nebulous haze. 
There is still another meaning which it is just conceiv- 
fle that the phrase, “Christ died our death,” might be 
tended toconvey. If “death” be regarded as the symbol 
/ consummation of our earthly trials and sufferings, it 
tht be meant that he shared or bore these with us. He 
ght be said to have taken upon him our death, as he 
Jour sicknesses. “ He bore our griefs and carried our 
rows.” In this case, it might be meant that “he died 
(\I ideath *” in the sense of a sympathetic identification 
Bh us in the trials and sufferings which are summarized 
Jeath. On this understanding of the statement it 
d contain no idea of penal substitution, nor any such 
eption as that the condemnation due to our sins fell 
Christ. It is not likely, however, that any one 
d employ the phrase in question to express the substi- 
o by strong sympathy to which we here refer. It is 
inly one of the infelicities of many recent discussions 
onement that statements of this sort are freely made 
no clear indication of what they are intended to mean. 
ud add to the objection made to the proposition under 
w by Dr. Forrest that “it is not scriptural and may 
y mislead,”! the criticism that, in the absence of 
it definition, it is singularly unclear and fatally 
ouds the discussion of the subject. 
n view of considerations like the foregoing I am led to 
conclusion that the only ground of forgiveness is the 
grace, and that in no sense is God compelled to 
or to do something which is the equivalent of 


1 The Christ of History and of Experience, p. 239. 


386 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRI 


punishing, before he can forgive. There is forgive 
with him not because he has been propitiated, but bee 
he is the gracious God whose mercy endureth fore 
Christ’s mission to earth is not to make God willin 
save men but to make men willing to be saved. In 
the grace of God that brings salvation appeared t 
men. He did not come to procure, but to proclaim 
bestow forgiveness. Salvation is grounded in the di 
nature. God saves because he loves. The fact tha 
saves requires no other explanation than that it is his 
cious will and nature to save men —and is capable o 
other. All the mechanisms of expiation and satisfac 
which men have interposed between the divine loye 
human salvation, would be themselyes preposterous 
impossible except on the supposition that they ] 
their spring in the divine love. If, then, they are 
mitted, on all hands, to be grounded in the divine 
how can they procure or make possible its exercise ? 
schemes of expiation have this peculiarity: They 
obliged to assume the divine love as their basis and me 
in order to show how the operation of the divine loy 
made possible. Love devises the plan for removing 
obstacle to its own exercise. It is justice which i 
poses this obstacle. Thus we come back to the et 
notion of a separation of the attributes which treat 
bargain with each other in the interest of their respe 
rights. , 

Many writers, shrinking from all such conclusions 
conceptions, would say : It is not a question of placa 
one attribute that another may operate ; God’s love 
be the motive and ground of salvation ; but since | 
holy love, it must so manifest itself as to assert the ¢ 
of sin and to proclaim the divine condemnation of 
The method of salvation must conserve the divine 
consistency in forgiveness. 

To such a formal statement I should readily enc 
agree. But the question at once arises: In what 
or by what means is it necessary for God to exp 
his righteousness in providing and offering forgivene 


é 



























THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO HUMAN SIN 387 


w, in point of fact, is this done in the work of Christ ? 
are is the crucial question. Here is where the diffi- 
ties begin and the differences arise. I may add that, 
my judgment, here is where most modern writers on 
= subject become indefinite and unclear. Did Christ 
al or vindicate God’s righteousness in his sufferings 
death because in those experiences he was enduring 
ething like punishment or some substitute for punish- 
? Did he suffer a withdrawal of God’s presence ? 
the face of the Father turned away from him in 
that by that experience of desertion God’s dis- 
ure at sin might be so expressed that it need not be 
ssed in punishment? Was his suffering a substitute 
man’s penal suffering and so a satisfaction to the 
eous anger of God ? 
large number of mediating writers would answer ques- 
like these in the affirmative. They will not say that 
endured the wrath of God or bore the penalty of 
but they are eager to approximate this conception as 


ed, endured sufferings which were the moral equiva- 
of sin’s penalty, underwent experiences which were a 
ibstitute for punishment and which answered the same 
, namely, the vindication of God’s holiness and the 
tion of the ill-desert of sin. In this way, they say, 
reveals his self-consistency in the work of Christ. 


nakes an exhibition of his righteousness which shows 
he is unalterably hostile to all sin. 
Weshall meet this quasi-penal theory in otherconnections 
shall later subject it to further examination. At pres- 
am concerned to indicate the method in which it 
Ts our question: How is the work of Christ related 
forgiveness of sins? It answers thus: In order that 
[may consistently forgive, Christ must bear sufferings 
h somehow express sin’s ill-desert and God’s con- 
tion of it as adequately as punishment would have 
Christ’s sufferings and death were a substitute for 
y and had the object and effect of vindicating God’s 


a 


388 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRE 
















retributive righteousness, so that in his sufferings we 
hold both the goodness and the severity of God. If 
reader asks : How is the assertion proved that Chri 
sufferings had this character? I must counsel him 
ercise patience. We shall consider the “proof” in 
time. It suffices our present purpose to know that 
is the principle of the mediating or vice-penal thee 
which seek to stand midway between the penal and 
ethical interpretations of Christ’s work: God can now fr 
forgive because he has vindicated his righteousnes 
Christ’s sufferings which were a substitute for punishr 
and answered its purposes. 

Let us now return to the formal proposition on ¥ 
we agreed, that in salvation God will make evident 
evil of sin and his repudiation of it, and inquire how 
applied by theories which discard all rivalries and com} 
tions among attributes and all notions of legal substitut 

By everything that Christ ever said and did he 
making manifest the holiness of God and the evil of | 
The very idea of salvation to a Godlike life implies” 
sin is an opposition to God and therefore a state of ho: 
ity to his holy will. Were it otherwise, there would 
no occasion for salvation — nothing from which man n 
to be saved. Now all that Christ does for sinful men 
teaching, labor, and suffering, is done for them bee: 
their sin is an evil and accursed thing, separating t 
from fellowship with God and their own true dest 
And when, to win men from sin to holiness, he enters” 
deepest sympathy with them, bears their woes upon 
compassionate heart and endures the most bitter g 
and tortures in his anxieties and labors to bring then 
God —then those sufferings with and for them bee 
the supreme revelation of his estimate of sin. The ¢ 
shows what love will do to save men from sin. It there 
fore becomes the measure of sin’s evil and the symbol ¢ 
God’s estimate of it. The blood of Christ seals G 
condemnation of moral evil and proclaims the suprem 
of the holy love which will stop at no labor or sufferin 
order that men may be recovered to harmony with its 


THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO HUMAN SIN 389 





Vv e may reverently say that God must condemn sin 
hile saving men from it. But it does not follow that he 
‘nust condemn it by one process, a penal substitution, and 


then save from it by another, a legal imputation. Nor 
loes it follow that he condemns it by appeasing one attribute, 
un then saves from it by the operation of another. God 





















jondemns sin in the very act of saving manfromit. How 
loes a mother make manifest her estimate of the evil of a 
eprobate son’s course of life? Does it appear that she 
lisapproves his course because she first insists upon his 
‘mprisonment as a condition precedent to any effort to re- 
joyer him to a good life? Or does she, perhaps, first 
oroceed to punish one of her other children that she may 
fake it clear that she is uncompromising in her moral 
trictness, and as an offset to the manifestation of grace 
hich she intends to make toward the sinful son? To me 
t seems evident that her deep sympathy and sadness, her 
wayers and tears, her loving labors and entreaties, suffi- 
jiently show how she thinks and feels about the evil of 
dis sin. It does not seem to me that she needs to do 
‘omething special to make it clear that she disapproves 
er son’s course of life. I think that the Gethsemane of 
er mother’s heart expresses at once her hatred of the sin 
at is ruining her son and her yearning love of him. 

Tam familiar with the answer which is commonly made 
‘considerations like this. There is no parallel between 
e two cases, it is said, since God is a Judge, a Ruler, a 
joyereign, and must safeguard the interests of the whole 
oral system. Certainly, no one would mean to intimate 
bat the human relations referred to are fully adequate to 
Iustrate the relations of God to men. But I venture to 
aaintain that they are quite as adequate and less mislead- 
jag than those equally human analogies of which the legal 
/nd penal theology makes use. It was the paternal and 
jot the legal illustrations which our Lord chiefly employed. 
Vhen, therefore, it is said, as by Dr. Dale, that the 
ternal analogy breaks down when we apply it to the 
sideration of God’s method in salvation, it appears to 
I a that Christ’s method of viewing the attitude of God to 


















































390 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE 


sinners and the relation of his own work to human 
explicitly repudiated. ] 
We shall have occasion to recur ‘to this same ‘ i 


death and in discussing in what sense it can be said 
God was satisfied in the work of Christ, or specifica 
his sufferings and death. Meantime, let me say agai 
tinctly that whether the manifestation of righteou 
which the ethical theory finds in Christ’s labors 
sufferings for men be satisfactory or not, the charge 
quently uted that the representatives of this theory li 
estimate sin or regard God as lenient or 
toward it, is baseless and unjust. It does not f 
because I deny that God must and always does punis 
sin, that I, therefore, deny that God is unchangeably 
and must disapprove and condemn all sin, —any 
than it follows because I may not see fit to punish e 
fault which I see in my child, that I am therefore ind 
ent to such faults. It is time that this method of ma 
capital for the penal and make-believe penal theories 
discontinued and that the answers to the real questi 
issue should be considered simply on their merits. — 
question is: How did God express his righteousness 
condemnation of sin in the work of Christ? and the 
three generic answers. The penal theory says: He 
so by visiting the penalty of sin upon Christ. The q 
penal theories say : He did so by causing Christ to er 
sufferings which were the moral equivalent of the pe 
of sin and which subserved its purposes. The 1 
theory says: He did so by Christ’s work of holy loy 
man’s behalf. If you ask what sin is in the eyes of 
look on the sufferings and death of Christ endured i 
desire and effort to save men from sin; they ar 
answer. 

At this point at which there is so much misunders 
ing and misrepresentation, I will illustrate and forti 
observations just made by quoting the words of or 
has vigorously championed what is commonly knoy 
the “moral theory” on the ground that it és the a 

























HE RELATION OF CHRIST TO HUMAN SIN 391 


ry. ‘This then,” writes President Henry C. King, ‘is 

ry thing that the grace of God accomplishes. God’s 
sring love in Christ secures such a triumph of right- 
ness over sin as punishment could never gain. It 
; the man into the covenant friendship with Christ, 
‘sympathy with him who was in absolute sympathy 
God. It puts his sin, in the first place, in the 
of the suffering love of God, and brings home the 
and the guilt of it to the heart of the sinner as no 
hment could do. It breaks the hard heart. It 
is him to share God’s hatred of his sin. Not hell, 
as that is, but the vision of the suffering heart of 
of what sin costs the Father — convicts of sin with 
This self-sacrificing love of God in Christ brings 
man into the sharing of Christ’s purpose also—the 
g of his life of love. There is here the promise of 
d, of the complete triumph over sin. The child 
hares the Father’s own purpose for him, and enters 
y into it. He has begun a divine covenanted 
ship that only needs to have its way to make sin to 
This is the real victory of God over sin, and it is 
ht by love. “In Christ” there is a genuine at-one- 


fhy, then, is the cross of Christ necessary? Why is; 
ge a place given to it both in the New Testament 
the Church? It is not necessary as death or cruci- 
per se. The facts of the atonement are not physi- 
d the sin of man cannot be necessary to the plan of 
Not as a propitiation of the wrath of God. God 
f is everywhere represented in Scripture as back of 
ork of Christ, and the nearest possible approach to 
jon of sin is the ceasing of sin. Not as a punish- 
of Christ for our sins, or as an expression of God’s 
with Christ. Both are ethically inconceivable. 
b suffers—he is in no true sense punished, and 
rt character nor the proper consequences of it can be 
transferred. Not as a mere governmental device 
to substitute something for the punishment of the 
The suffering love of God is far more effective 


392 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DC 



























than punishment, but God does not suffer for this’ 

Nor, finally, as a designed dramatic exhibition of f 

love to man. God loves and suffers in Christ, but Cl 

does not come primarily to show the love and sufferit 

God, but actually to seek men, to redeem them from 
\_ sin because he loves.”? 

t is entirely legitimate for those who think that 
moral theory does not lay sufficient stress upon the 
ness of God, to seek to show that this is the case. © 
quite proper for them to argue that their opponents 
ception of the divine holiness is not adequate, or so 
quate and true as their own. They may appropri 
enough contend that retribution is the primary im 
and requirement of the divine nature. But they are 
dom content with efforts of this kind. They will ha 
that representatives of moral influence views make 
sin in their theories, and imagine that God does not r 
or treat it seriously. This is an insinuation w 
requires some charity to regard asa mere misapprehel 
It is but fair to insist, on the other side, that expone 
the so-called moral or subjective view of atoneme! 
not, in fact, lightly esteem sin or fail to emphasiz 
essential hostility of God’s nature to it, and they d 
believe that their opinions are justly open to the ¢ 
of so doing. So commonly is the charge made, hoy 
and, in my judgment, so unwarrantably, that I will: 
in refutation of it, one other advocate of “ benevolene 
“Men must be saved morally,” says Professor 
Bowne, “if saved at all. If God were simply a Be 
good nature, and without interest in the righteousn 
his creatures, he could easily make them happy by 
power and at no cost to himself or to any one else. 
is the sentimentalist’s notion of what ought to be. 
notion is forever vacated by the cross of Christ. Ge 
be at infinite cost to save men, but he will save them 
ally or not at all. It is a moral world in which we 
and we are under the inexorable law of righteot 


1 Article on ‘‘ The Atonement”’ in The Congregationalist, Oct 
1898. ; 


? 


THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO HUMAN SIN 393 


hi 
‘here is no provision made for relaxing moral demands. 
‘he promised land is only for those who attain unto the 
pirit of righteousness. The wilful and disobedient may 
vander 1 in the desert forever ; they cannot enter in. The 
nly hope for sinners consists in their being saved from 
inning. There is and can be no other emacs which 
e moral reason will accept. The work of Christ, as 
us morally conceived, demonstrates, we repeat, the right- 
ousness of God.” } 
What, now, shall be said of the much debated question 
garding the relation of Christ to the guilt and penalty 
sin? The traditional answer is, that he assumed the 
ilt of sin which God imputed to him, and suffered the 
nalty of it (or its equivalent) in our stead. But what 
guilt? It is a name for the quality which belongs to 
oral evil; it is a term to describe the character — the 
ameworthiness of sin. How now could a sinless person 
ssume this quality? How could blameworthiness be im- 
uted to the blameless? Such assertions lose all appear- 
ace of plausibility as soon as the meaning of the word 
‘guilt’ isconsidered. The theological books speak of guilt 
s if it were a kind of entity which Christ could take up 
. carry, as he carried the cross. Such representations 


















em to me extremely naive. 

/Christ had a clear sight and an intense sense of the 
fog of sin. Only a holy being, such as he was, can 
equately realize in his thought and feeling the exceed- 
g sinfulness of sin. This is the truth underlying the 
eories of expiatory confession or vicarious repentance 
ich are elaborated by Drs. Campbell and Moberly. As 
‘pressed by these writers they are, indeed, paradoxical. 
e sinless Christ does not, properly speaking, repent of 
confess ‘sin for us. That we must do for ourselves. 
pentance is the part of sinners, not of the sinless. But 
rist knew, as no other ever did, the awful contrast of 
with holiness, and he entered into fullest sympathy 
th mankind in their sufferings and sorrows under the 
ight and curse of moral evil. And into his own sense 


1 The Atonement, pp. 97-99. 







































394 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRE 


of sin and condemnation of it, he conducts those who 
low him into the heights of his own holiness and make 
estimates and ideals of life their own. 

And how did his life-work stand related to sin’s co 
quences? If these consequences are solely retributiy 
designed only for the satisfaction of distributive jus 
then, certainly, Christ did not vicariously endure the 
sequences of sin. That the guiltless should bear p 
ment in this sense is a contradiction in terms. Did Ch 
then, bear chastisement or discipline ? Some have affir 
this and have thus maintained a semblance of the 
penal theory. But this conception is only a pale imag 
the post-Reformation dogma. Whether one may prop 
use such language is a question of defining words. I 
“ chastisement” is meant suffering inflicted in consequ 
of sin for the benefit of the sinner (the usual meal 
of the word, as I suppose), then it is obviously absurt 
speak of Christ as being chastised. The more indef 
term “ discipline” one may use, if he means by it what 
Epistle to the Hebrews means in saying that Christ lea 
obedience by the things which he suffered, or was m 
perfect by his sufferings. But such a term carries us 
side the circle of ideas commonly denoted by “ penal.” 
say that Christ was punished is absurd. To say tha 
was chastised is equally absurd, if frankly and serio 
meant. In actual usage the assertion is probably on 
those vague, non-committal affirmations in which the 
recent forms of governmentalism commonly take refu 

In what sense, then, was Christ “made sin on 
behalf” (2 Cor. v. 21)? In what sense did he “bee 
a curse for us” (Gal. iii. 13)? In the sense that 
entered into the perfect realization of the misery 
guilt of our sin, suffering these with and for us 
Edwards says, by strong sy mpathy. In his oneness’ 
us the evils which flow from sin afflicted his spirit 
deep and awful distress. He entered perfectly into 
conditions in which sin had involved us. He bore 
griefs and carried our sorrows. He descended to 
prison-house that he might share our woes with us. 





2 THE RELATION OF CHRIST TO HUMAN SIN 3895 















he did as a means to our deliverance. He stooped to 
conquer us. In his pure heart he felt the curse of evil 
and with us tasted its bitter fruit. Thus by sympathetic 
identification —through the vicariousness of love — was 
he “ made sin on our behalf” in the only sense which can 
haye any ethical meaning or reality; thus by perfect 
mion with men in the misery and wretchedness which 
flow from sin, did he share the curse of sin for us. And 
by this vicarious suffering with and for sinners he has 
condemned sin and exalted holiness\_ Would you see 
what sinis? Look on the cross! See how sin regarded 
and treated incarnate love! Would you learn what holi- 
ness is? Look again on the cross! See what holy love 
ill do and suffer to raise man out of the curse of sin into 
harmony with itself. The cross expresses the verdict of 
oly love upon the worth of man and its condemnation 
apon the sin which would destroy him. Hence the cross 
is the symbol of the most precious truths of our faith. It 
summarizes what is central in the saving work of Christ 
pecause it expresses what is supreme in the bosom of 
sternal love. God forbid that we should glory save in 
she cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. 







CHAPTER VIII 


THE NECESSITY OF CHRIST’S DEATH 

















Way was it necessary for Christ to suffer and die, 
what, for his consciousness, was the purpose to be achit 
by such an experience? These two questions are q 
inseparable because the nature of the reasons why 
must suffer and die would be determined by the ok 
which his death was to secure or promote. But # 
questions involve others. Was his death the direct ob 
of his whole career, or was it an experience which 
in the path by which he sought some end beyond its 
Did he come into the world to die, or did he die in eo 
quence of being what he was in such a world as t 
Must we regard the question respecting the necessit 
his death from the side of its human, historical oa 


salvation of mankind ? ) 

To the question immediately in hands Why wa 
necessary for Christ to die? the most various amsy 
have been given: In order, by enduring the penalt 


a forgiveness; that the Old Testament prophecies mi 
be fulfilled ; because the will of God had so ordair 
to render fone to the divine law against sin and s¢ 
express God’s holy displeasure toward it; to attest 
own perfect submission to the divine law of self-saer 
ing love; to consummate his fidelity to truth and rig 
eousness in a world which was hostile to his ideals 
purposes. Some of these customary answers are ¢ 
formal, as when it is said that prophets foretold the 
siah’s death, or that the divine will required it. We 

396 







THE NECESSITY OF CHRIST'S DEATH 397 
have to ask: What was the ground or rationale of this re- 
“quirement ? Until we have found some answer to that 
question we have made no progress; we remain content 
with saying: It was necessary because it was prophesied 
or decreed that it must happen. 

In reviewing the references to the death of the Messiah 
in the Synoptic Gospels and in the earlier discourses in 
‘Acts (pp. 42 sq., 55 sg.), we saw that while Jesus spoke of 
his death as inevitable in view of the increasing hostility , 
of the people, he also regarded it as having a great provi- 
dential purpose to serve in his saving work. The early 
‘apostolic teaching viewed the subject in a similar light ; 
‘his death resulted from human hatred, but it was, at the 
same time, designed by Providence to prove a means to 
the accomplishment of the messianic salvation. Now the 
great problem for primitive Christian thought was this : 
In what way did the death of Christ serve this end? 
‘How did his suffering secure or contribute to man’s re- 

very from sin? We have in the New Testament the 
beginnings of the long history of philosophizing on this 
question. 
| One thing is clear: Christian thought can never rest 
‘content with merely summarizing the human historical 
onditions and circumstances which occasioned Christ’s 
eath. It is true, of course, that he died because the 
eople of his time opposed and hated him. He died the 
death of a martyr, for a martyr is a heroic witness to 
he truth of certain convictions and ideals which he main- 
ins at whatever cost to himself. But the death of a 
martyr even cannot be wholly explained by reference to 
i opposition and obloquy which he encounters, apart 
tom the motives and convictions which give meaning 
‘ind purpose to his life. Our question, then, takes this 
orm: Did Jesus have a settled life-purpose, a providen- ~ 
ial mission, which he felt himself bound to accomplish 
'\t whatever cost of labor and suffering, and how did his 
eath, as the acme of this labor and suffering, stand re- 
ted to it? That he had such a purpose, and what it 
‘as, is evident on the face of the Gospels. That purpose 



















i 





5 













































398 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINI 


is stated in various terms, but they all mean essen al 
the same: to found the Kingdom of God; to enable m 


to seek and to save the lost ; to bear witness to the trut 
It is also evident that, as time went on, it became moi 
and more clear to him that he would have to die in # 
accomplishment of this object, and that his death, so fe 
from being the defeat of his plan, would contribute toi 
realization. He regards himself as subject to the unive 
sallaw: “He that gives his life shall save it.” Hen 
the giving of his life is to be a potent means to the rai 
som of many. 

It is worth noting, I think, that in these most signi 
cant expressions of Jesus concerning his life-purpose a 
his manner of realizing it, he speaks not of death but 
the giving of his life. Now certainly the life-giving 
which he was speaking involved the experience of d yin 
but are the expressions, on that account, synonymou 
Was the meaning of Jesus in saying that he would gi 
his life for men, exhausted in the idea that he wou 
expire for their benefit? Or if we, for the moment, di 
regard the characteristic expression of Jesus and keep 
the term which theology has chiefly employed, we mu 
still ask: What was death, what did death mean, to Jesu 
What was his own death as he viewed it? Is there t 
slightest intimation in his teaching that he regarded des 
in general, or his own death in particular, as the penal 
of sin? That was a popular theory at the time, and ity 
soon brought over into Christian thought and applied 
the effort to explain the saving significance of Jesus’ deat 
but of this current Jewish opinion there is as little tre 
in the teaching of Jesus as there is of any of the the 01 
which were then current concerning the origin and pro} 
gation of sin. It is safe to say that for the mind of 
Jewish Christian, trained in a legalist mode of thoug! 
and to whom it was axiomatic that Christ’s death was 
means of salvation, no explanation would lie so near 
hand as this: Death is sin’s penalty; Christ died, thot 
sinless; therefore, in so doing he was enduring the penal 





THE NECESSITY OF CHRIST'S DEATH 399 
¥ 

of others’ sins and has thereby exempted them from its 
endurance. 

It is this circle of ideas—employed, among others, by 
Paul — which is the determining factor in the older forms 
a orthodoxy. It has not been, however, sufficiently con- 
- sidered by theologians that it proceeds upon the unques- 
tionable correctness of a certain ancient Jewish theory of 
_ the origin and nature of sin. It was not the Old Testa- 
ment conception —certainly not the prevailing view of 
the Jewish canonical writers‘—but it was a current 
theory in rabbinic Judaism and happens to have been 
the conception of the subject in which Paul had been 
trained. That circumstance has done more to determine 
the form of Christian speculation on the subject of Christ’s 
death than all the references of our Lord himself to the 
subject. The penal interpretation can hardly dispense 
with this Jewish speculation. It is therefore quite natural 
that Professor Denney, in his effort to commend the propo- 
| sition that Christ “died our death” to “ the modern mind,” 
| should undertake a defence of the idea that physical death 
is the consequence of sin.? 

There is no reason to believe that our Lord thought of 
| his own death in any negative or isolated way. It was 
not a being deprived of life; it was not even the mere 
|, experience of being killed. It was a part of his self- 
|| giving ; it was the transition to fuller life and to a com- 
pleter victory; it was a saving of life by giving it. In 
| this sense he came to minister and to give his life; in this 
sense it was needful that he should suffer that he might 
enter into his glory. The grain of wheat must fall into 
the earth and die if it would bring forth much fruit. The 
question, in what sense he died for men, is the question in 

















-1Cf. Tennant, The Fall and Original Sin, pp. 118, 119: “It would 
seem that death is presupposed in Gen. iii. 19 (‘for dust thou art,’ etc.) 
to be a natural consequence of man’s earthly origin; in other words, 
| death was decreed for man from the first.’’ ‘‘ And the doctrine thus 
attributed to Genesis is generally admitted to be that of the Old Testa- 
ment as a whole. Death is treated everywhere as the inevitable out- 
come of natural human limitations.” 
| *See The Atonement and the Modern Mind, pp. 90-107. 


























400 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 

J 

what sense he gave his life for them, and that again 
synonymous with the question, in what sense he came 
minister. Jesus himself coupled all these expressic 
together, and in his thought and teaching they expla 
each other. Death, for him, stood in no contrast to lif 

it was the completion of life. His death was a part 
his ministry, his service, his self-giving for the ransor 
ing, that is, for the saving, of many. Why, then, did ] 
give his life? Was it that he might influence me 
That he might attest the truth of which he had cor 
to bear witness? That he might reveal God in his co 
passion or disclose the evil of sin and so condemn i 
We can see all these results —and others —as the i 
of Jesus’ self-giving, but, so far as we know, he pres 
no analysis of the particular objects of his self-devolil 
It is not the manner of self-effacing love to announce tl 
specific purposes which it expects to secure by its service 
Especially incongruous is the idea that Jesus proposed 
display the divine love in order to impress men, as if 
mother were to say to herself: “I will so love this chil 
of mine as to impress him with the evil and shame of id d 
obeying me.” Love is no such analyzing, cale ati 
prudence. Love gives because it is its nature so to d 
and Christ gave himself for men not that he might reve 

, display, or secure something, but because he was a ¢ are 
lover of men, and great love means self- absorption | 
service and sacrifice for its objects. He gave hims 
for mankind, because for love it is supremely blessed 1 
give. : 
We have had occasion to observe how common it is f 
their critics to represent all interpretations of the deal 
of Christ which repudiate its penal significance and y 
it rather as the culmination of his life of self-giving, 
making a kind of exhibition of love for an ulterior em 
It is no wonder that those who deem this characteri ‘ 
fair and just should never weary of insisting that it 
a singularly superficial and unsatisfying view. If ~ 
premisses of the argument be granted, the contention 
question seems to me, indeed, quite demonstrable. ft 





















THE NECESSITY OF CHRIST'S DEATH 401 


opinions which it purports to represent.1_ For my- 
, 1 hold that Christ came to realize in the world the 
ads of God’s holy love. His whole life-work was conse- 
ted to this object. He taught and labored and suffered 
died to accomplish it. His life reveals God; his 
death reveals God—for they are not two but one. He 
Jid not live for one object and die for another. He did 
live to magnify God’s mercy and die to magnify his 
th. If ever there was a mission, a life-work, an ex- 
ience which was all of a piece — which was animated by 
ne central, unifying purpose, it was his. His whole aim 
to bring God to men, to found the Kingdom of God 
‘among men, to bring to realization the life of God in men. 


n sinfulness is unveiled ; their possibilities and privileges 
e discovered. Christ lived and died to secure all these 
ults, but the basis of them all is the fact that he made 
and living the compassionate love and holy require- 
nts of God; he influenced men because he revealed and 
mterpreted God to them; his whole meaning lies in this 

Mediation. He came and lived and wrought to bring 
| God and man together; he brought God near to man that 
man might come freely to God; he revealed God’s father- 





_ 1In illustration let the reader consult the preposterous caricature of 
moral view in Dr. Dale’s Atonement (pp. liii._Iv. of the Preface to 
seventh edition, and elsewhere) to the effect that it teaches a pur- 
less and meaningless show of love for which there was no moral 
essity. See the trenchant criticism of Dr. Tymms, in which the 
irreleyancy of Dr. Dale’s illustrations and the misconceptions un- 
ying his arguments are exhibited, in The Christian Idea of Atone- 
ent, pp. 179-183. 























402 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


hood that man might know his possible sonship; he di 
closed and illustrated God’s holiness that man might kno 
and hate and forsake his sin. For these ends he came ai 
lived and labored, and he died in the cause for which } 
lived and for the ends for which he came. 

Such was Jesus’ conception of his own death, so far 
we can gather it from the few references which have bee 
preserved to us. I point out again that there is not 
trace in his words of the idea that he was to die to appea 
the wrath of God, or to protect his dignity, or to safeguar 
his government. Whatever be the source of these idea 
they are foreign to the consciousness of Christ. he 
may be held, on one ground or another, to be authoritatiy 
and true, but the fact remains that —so far as we have ar 
means of knowing —they had no place in the though 
world of Jesus; within the first Christian century tradi 
tion had not yet ascribed to him any such ideas. Buti 
does not follow that his death was conceived by him ¢ 
having a mere “subjective” import or that he viewed 
as a means of creating an impression. Surely the choi 
does not lie between this preposterous conception and th 
notion that his death was the penalty of the world’s sit 
His death was no more subjective in its meaning @ 
value than his life was. Both reveal God and illustrat 
his nature and perfections, and both illustrate the sam 
divine nature and perfections. But certainly there ar 
aspects of God’s being and action besides punitive justi 
which might be illustrated in the work of Christ. Is tha 
the only thing in God which is important enough to ler 
an “objective” significance to Christ’s saving mission 
Is it retributive righteousness or nothing? If so, the 
there certainly zs as little gospel in the teaching of Jest 
as the penal theory finds there. 

In the light of the foregoing considerations our ques 
recurs: In what lay the necessity of Christ’s death 
Why did it appear inevitable to the mind of Jesus hin 
self? The view of some that Jesus had from the begi 
ning of his public ministry, or even throughout the whol 
course of his life, a definite expectation of being put 




























THE NECESSITY OF CHRIST’S DEATH 403 


eath cannot be established by historical evidence. The 
supposition which goes further and represents his death 
the cross as the direct object of his whole mission on 
garth is obviously a dogmatic inference. Just when he 
rived at the clear conviction that a violent death awaited ° 
im, we have no means of knowing. We have seen that, 
part from one or two doubtful intimations, it was late in 
ministry when he declared such an expectation. But 
question is less important, if we retain the historical 
int of view, than it has been commonly assumed to be in 
loctrinal speculation. We have almost no means for car- 
ying this or any similar question into the long silent 
ears preceding his public work. We must raise our 
stions at the point at which history begins to furnish 
ne data to proceed upon ; that point is the ministry of 
Baptist and his introduction of Jesus to the people, 
h which the apostolic tradition begins. 
Now from that point onward we see that Jesus has 
sfinitely consecrated and committed himself to the 
ssianic mission. There might well, even at this period, 
e been questions in his mind as to the specific ways in 
ich this mission was to be realized and what his par- 
ar experiences were to be in its prosecution. The 
yospels do not warrant us in supposing that Jesus had 
tured to himself in advance exactly the forms and meas- 
f opposition which he would encounter and all the 
ise turns which events would take as he proceeded 
h his work. But they do make it clear that he had 
rmined from the beginning on what methods and 
iples his messianic task was to be undertaken. It 
involved in the situation which confronts us at the“ 
ing of his ministry, and was apparent to the mind of 
[ us, that his methods were not to be those which were 
opularly expected and approved and that his whole con- 
tion of the Messiah’s character and function was fun- 
ntally different from that of the people. 
this fact all subsequent results and consequences 
implicit. What, now, were those methods and prin- 
of his whose consistent maintenance and application 





































404. CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


involved everything that befell him? They begin 
appear in the story of his temptation. It matters not, f 
our present purpose, in what precise degree the narra ti 
of this initial trial is historical. It is probably a pictom 
symbolic description of the inner experiences of Jesus 
this critical period. But if so, it is none the less true, si 
nificant, and instructive in its bearing upon our Lor 
plan and purpose than it would be if read as a strictly hi 
torical narrative of outward events. The point of chi 
interest which the story brings to light is the fact th 
Jesus definitely repudiated at this time the program 
popular messianic expectation. He would not win acce 
ance by startling displays of arbitrary supernatural pow 
He would turn no stones into bread, hurl himself from 
temple-pinnacle, bow down to no tempter who offered, 
such conditions, a cheap popular success. The na vat 
is predominantly negative in its cast ; it portrays what. 
refused to do, but, by contrast, its positive significance 
great. His was a widely different conception of mes 
anic service and success from that popularly current, a 
this conception of his he was sure had the sanction of 
divine will. He knew his plan to be grounded int 
divine purpose and in its prosecution he would live 
work according to the divine word, would worship 4 
serve God alone. 

Now just what his program should be in concrete fa 
only the subsequent course of events can show 3 but | 
principles of a plan of life are already here. He | 
struck a note immeasurably higher than that of popu 
aspiration. We do not follow him far on his way bef 
we begin to see the consequences in which his plan 
volves him. He had consecrated himself absolutely t 
work for the spiritual good of men. He had devoted t 
self to the work of revealing God to men, as he kr 
him. He had determined to found a Kingdom of ¢ 
among men—a Kingdom based wholly upon love 
employing neither force nor fear for its support. 
would magnify and enthrone in the hearts of men 
holy requirements of God. He would teach men th 


5 THE NECESSITY OF CHRIST’S DEATH 405 


is vain to worship God with gifts and sacrifices, while 
affronting him with pride, selfishness, and hate. He 
would show men what God is that they might more truly 
see what he requires. He would be himself a way to the 
Father. He would unveil to men their secret sins that~ 
they might be led to seek the divine mercy. For these 
ends he would live and, if need be, suffer; in the effort 
to accomplish them he would labor and, if need be, die.- 
Such was the mind of Christ with respect to his life-work. 
He had come to give himself for the ransom of men — to 
liberate them from their slavery to small views of duty, 
low ideals of life, and unworthy conceptions of God. Did - 
he, then, come to die for men? Yes, and much more. 
He came to die for men because he came to live and work 
for them; to pour out for them every energy of his being ; 
to give his life, his very self, all that he had and was, for 
, their salvation. 
_ His death is not an isolated end in itself. It did not ~ 
represent for his consciousness the sole and immediate 
object of his being in the world. Even at the last he was 
able to pray: “If it be possible, let this cup pass from 
me.” Such a prayer would have been unreal if he had 
conceived that the whole meaning and success of his work 
lay in the experience of dying. In that case the presence v 
of an “if” would have meant a weakening of his consecra- 
| tion, a wavering of his fidelity. With the view of Christ’s 
| death often assumed in the dogmatic interpretation of it 
'—that he came into the world for the direct purpose of 
experiencing by dying the death-penalty of sin —it seems 
|impossible to reconcile the prayer “Let this cup pass 
from me,” even though conditioned by the words “if it be 
possible.” For surely in that solemn hour he could not 
| for a moment have imagined it possible, that is, consistent 
ith the divine will, for him to relinquish, after all, the 
urpose for which he had come and to abandon the work of 
/Saving the world. His work would not have been a failure 
f he had died a painless or accidental death. His death 
ould not have been less significant if the Roman method 
f execution had been by means of a gallows instead of a 




















j 
/ 


“7 body ; it is a symbol of the life which he gave for met 







































406 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 
cross. His work would not have been less complete if tl 
circumstances of the time had not occasioned his bei 
wounded by nails and a spear. Nay, if divine Providen 
had found it “ possible” to grant his prayer and to hay 
let the “cup pass from him,” his saving work of holy 1oy 
would not have failed, though it would have lacked th 
highest Allustration and attestation of which we can cor 
ceive. (the cross in Christian thought does not mean 
piece of wood of some particular shape, but is a symk 
of sacrificial and suffering love. Nor does the blood ¢ 
Christ mean the fluid which was a part of his physic 
In this sense only does the biblical language about d 
ing his blood have any intelligible meaning. 

Was there, then, no necessity for Christ's death beya 
its human inevitableness? I have already indicated tl 
insufficiency of such a view, and trust that what hi 
already been said has sufficed, in some measure, to illu 
trate its inadequacy. The necessity lay not alone in tl 
historical circumstances but in the nature of the we 
which he had undertaken in those circumstances. 
as we have seen, Jesus knew that his plan and aim wé 
accordant with the divine will and wisdom. This ben 
so, it was not possible for him to be spared the experien 
of death. His self-giving must involve it, since it W 
to be an unreserved self-giving. His obedience to q 
Father’s will must be an obedience even unto death. l 
cup that the Father had given to him he must d 
He must stop short of no task and no experience to wh 
serving, self-effacing love could lead ; he must give hi 
self to the uttermost. That was Jesus’ own view of | 
death. It was unavoidable and providentially necessa 
not as being the one separate event on which the salvation 
of men depended, but as being an indispensable part 01 
divine life-purpose and life-work of love. 

In reviewing the references of Jesus to his prospective 
death which have been preserved in the Gospels, we had 
occasion to note the reasons for thinking that the parabe 
saying about the bridegroom being taken away (Mk. ii. 2 






























THE NECESSITY OF CHRIST’S DEATH 407 


as either allegorized by the tradition or belonged to 
ne later stage of his teaching than that to which it is 
ed (p. 42). We also observed the historical diffi- 
es in supposing that John the Baptist could have 
ibed the Messiah in advance as the suffering Lamb 
God who should take away the sins of the world 
.. 94). Suppose, now, that these critical considerations 
egarded as decisive ; suppose that these sayings are 
aples of a translation back into the earlier history of 
ater events and meanings, it should still be said that 
case is not correctly judged apart from two facts: 
That such a tendency to find the full meaning and 
6 of events in the earlier stages of a career in which 
ley quite inevitably emerge, is perfectly natural; and 
}) that such an interpretation, in a case like the present, 
ngs from a correct instinct and illustrates an insight 
h accords with Jesus’ actual attitude toward his life- 
k. His death for men was, from the first, implicit in 
s life for them. Whether John the Baptist knew it 
d said it or not, Jesus was from that day when they met at 
e Jordan, the fulfilment of Isaiah’s vision of the patient 
rant of God who in his undeserved suffering for men 
Id be led, as a lamb, to the slaughter; he was by 
fe of a divine purpose in which his life was grounded 
by his absolute consecration of himself to that pur- 
, the One who should both bear and bear away the 
of the world ; he was the One who had already taken 
him the sicknesses, sorrows, and sins of mankind 
/nrough sympathetic identification and sacrificial love. If 
e them on the cross, it was because he had borne 
in his life ; if in that last hour he most of all felt 
oe and burden of human misery, it was because that 
the hour in which the very meaning and purpose of 
hole life were concentrated. He was the sin-bearing 
of the prophetic vision; he was the One who should 
r the nation and who from his cross of sacrifice 
bring together the scattered children of God and 
he whole world to himself in interest, sympathy, and 


¢ 


























408 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 


The considerations which we have thus far adduce¢ 
bearing upon the question, why our Lord’s death | 
necessary, are of a historical rather than a specula 
character. It is true that Christian thought early ente 
upon a speculative treatment of this question and, as t 
went on, developed the most elaborate a priori constructi 
in its treatment of it. It proceeded, now from cert 
conceptions of the relations and transactions between 
Almighty and Satan, now from the necessity of reeruit 
the ranks of the angels, or again from the dramatic rey 
sentation of an impending conflict among the rival attrib 
of Deity. Where the views taken were not so erud 
realistic, they were still very definite and positive al 
the divine plans, purposes, and decrees in which 
necessity in question was grounded. The stand 
treatises on atonement, from Anselm to Edwards, do 
concern themselves with the historical aspects of 
subject or make any considerable use of the ayaili 
facts which are known to us regarding the attitud 
Jesus himself to his own death. The traditional thee 
find their point of beginning somewhere in the natur 
eternal purpose of God. This nature or purpose 1s” 
defined a priori, and from these definitions, in which 
whole result is logically implicit, the theory of Chr 
death is gradually deduced. Great gifts and dev 
piety have been consecrated to these efforts, and m 
profound and important truths have been elaborated 
defined in them. I make no sweeping objection to # 
logical speculation. It has its own importance and ~ 
Indeed, we cannot avoid it. History itself often fore 
into the field of speculation if we would deal at all serie 
with its facts. But my contention is that the examina 
of questions like that which we are here conside 
should start from history and advance on historical gre 
so far as relevant data are available. We should, at 
rate, recognize the difference between historical inves 
tion and theological speculation and should seek to d 
and control the latter by means of the former. e 
properly enough rise from the ground of historical 

\ 


THE NECESSITY OF CHRIST’S DEATH 409 





into the upper air, but when making excursions in that 
Tegion, we shall always do well to Remind ourselves of 
what Lipsius says, — that when one ascends in a balloon, 
le should never permit himself to indulge the supposition 
that he is travelling by rail. 
| We shall have occasion later to consider more particu- 
arly the problem with which theology has been so much 
oeeupied : What is the relation of Christ’s saving work to 
she ethical nature of God? It may be well, however to 
doint out here the bearings upon that question of the con- 
siderations thus far adduced. These may be summarized 
on two statements: (1) The death of Christ was a part o 
iis life-giving, his ministration for the ransoming of many, 
nd has therefore essentially the same significance as his 
ife; and (2) His whole life-work of self-giving was 
rounded in a divine purpose of grace for mankind and 
vas therefore a supreme revelation of the will and nature 
if God. To this point we are brought by a consideration 
of the facts of Jesus’ teaching and consciousness. / Now, 
however far we may proceed in an effort to show how our 
ate life-work, or his death specifically, reveals and 
xpresses God, we should try to keep to the same path on 
Jatt we have already entered. We may fairly assume 
vhat the God who was pictured in our Saviour’s teaching 
s the God whose purpose he believed he was fulfilling, 
‘vhose nature he was expressing and whose will he was 
atisfying. If we agree that Christ’s work in life and in 
La expresses God and realizes his will, I submit that 

e should seek to derive our conception of God’s will and 
iature from Christ himself. It is wholly unwarranted to 
[tm the consciousness of Christ at this point in the 
| rgument. 

Let me ask the reader briefly to review in his mind the 
node of argument on this subject which characterizes all 
€ older theories — Anselmic, Grotian, and penal. Do 
ey sustain the test which we are here proposing? Do 























1 Man kann auch im Luftballon aufsteigen ; nur darf man sich nicht 
mbilden wollen, dass man mit der Eisenbahn fahrt. Philosophie und 
eligion, p. 208. 






























410 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRE 


they derive their conceptions of the God whom Ck 
(especially in his death) is supposed to express, vind ic 
and satisfy, from Christ himself? Is the Deity wh 
they define recognized by Christ or reflected or assun 
in his teaching or his prayers? Let us see. For An se 
the primary idea of God which appears in the work 
Christ is that of a Sovereign whose first concern is to 
and assert his dignity. The nearest human analogy to 
God of Anselm is the feudal baron. Is that idea parti 
larly germane to Christ’s conception? For Grotius € 
is a Ruler who must safeguard his laws. If they | 
broken, somebody must suffer in vindication of th 
authority. Did Christ present God under any such fe 
of representation ? For the penal satisfactionist God 
Judge who must dispense so much penalty for so m 
sin. The sin has occurred, the penalty must foll 
The primary requirement of God’s will is vengean 
The best illustration of this Deity is Shakespeare’s 8 
lock. Now these are the conceptions— more or 
qualified and inconsistently employed in many cases- 
which the older orthodoxies are composed. Are t 
Christian, or are they partly late Jewish, partly heath 
partly speculative ? 

That the theories in question contain, in a one-sided 
exaggerated form, some important truths I gladly ad I 
Such forms of thought have held their place in the Ch 
tian world, not chiefly on account of the errors, but rat 
on account of the truths which they cover. There iss 
truth in the late Jewish ideas about God ; there is s 
truth in the heathen conceptions of his being and act 
But they are not so true as Jesus’ conception of God 
any rate, they are not so appropriate as furnishing materia 
for Christian theology. My complaint against the olde 
forms of thought is precisely this, that they have der 
from Jesus the conviction that his work, and specific 
his death, expressed or satisfied the ethical nature of God 
and then have not derived from Christ himself their ¢on 
ceptions of what the ethical nature of God is. Thi 
“the head and front of their offending.” They have ba 


THE NECESSITY OF CHRIST’S DEATH 411 


one premiss from Christ and one from elsewhere. The 
_ common belief was that it was found in Paul, and if a cer- 
tain factor of Paul’s thought be regarded and estimated 
: in a one-sided, isolated way, a plausible claim may here 
_ be made. But whether from Paul, Apollos, or Cephas, 
i it was demonstrably not taken from Christ. Apart, now, 
from particular words and phrases employed by Paul, 
-Icontend that the best proof that the older orthodoxies 
_ (for there have been several with wide differences among 
themselves) are not accordant with Paul’s most original, 
_ characteristic, and specifically Christian conceptions, is the 
fact that they have issued in so many inferences which he 
“never suggested. How easy it is to deduce from the 
arguments and illustrations of a logician more than one 
view of a subject, especially if you never raise the ques- 
tion: What is the determining principle of his thought ? 
More than one view of atonement can be deduced from 
_ Augustine and from Calvin, according to the selection 
| which you make of passages, and it is demonstrable that 
three different theories may be drawn from Edwards’s 
short essay on the subject —the penal, the governmental, 
; and the ethical. Indeed, we have no need to go so far 
afield for illustrations. The penal, governmental, and 
“mystical theories of atonement have each pretty clear 
marks of distinction from each other. Which did Dr. 
‘Dale hold and advocate? In one book Dr. Strong cer- 
tainly defends the penal theory and in another seems, to me 
at least, to have adopted a theory more mystical than that 
of Frederick Denison Maurice ; yet there is no intimation 
and seemingly no consciousness on his part of any funda- 
‘mental change of opinion. The reviewers have generally 
eredited Dr. Denney with being an advocate of penal 
‘substitution, but this verdict he himself appears to reverse 
since he denies that such terms as “legal” or “forensic” 
are applicable to his views. | What now if the Christian 
world should suddenly fall to regarding and treating the 
| writings of any one of these theologians as it has com- 
“monly regarded and treated the letters of Paul,—as 
furnishing an authoritative norm for all Christian specu- 





ee 
I >» 
* 


i- 





412 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


lation, — what theory of atonement should we be required 
to hold ? 
My conviction is that there is a fundamental difference 
of method and procedure among those who discuss our 
present subject, which appears at the very point at which 
we are now standing. The question at issue is, whether 
when we have said that Christ’s death expresses God, we 
shall then try to see and to show how it expresses him b r 
the aid of what Jesus has revealed concerning him, or by 
the aid of some definition of his nature derived from other 
sources. Shall we be content to clothe that supreme 
event of Jesus’ experience in the meaning in which, so far 
as we can learn, he himself clothed it, or shall we impose 
upon it a significance which we have derived from some 
speculative analysis of the divine attributes? This latter, 
whether rightly or wrongly, is what theology has commonly 
done. I do not mean that the historical theories have not 
quoted texts from the teaching of Jesus. But I do mean 
(1) that even these texts have been read, not so much ir 
the light of his whole teaching and work as in that of sub 
sequent reflection, and with no critical consideration of 
the question, whether the phrases from the Gospels which 
have been most prized for the theological purpose im 
hand were not themselves examples of such reflection ; 
(2) that these theories have not even purported to buile 
primarily upon the teaching of Jesus; (8) that they 
have attempted for their purposes no study of Jesus 
consciousness of God and of his own mission as a whole ; 
(4) that Christ’s own specific ideas on such primary points 
as the ethical nature of God, and the relation of his ow 
death to his work as a whole, have received little or né 
consideration, and (5) that upon his conviction that his 
death was necessary and revealed the divine will ant 
nature have been imposed definitions of that will ane 
nature which were utterly foreign to the thought-world of 
Jesus. The old theologies in their treatment of Christ's 
death have taken the formal principle of their construction 
from Christ and the material principle from other sources. 
There is doubtless some choice among the sources fror 























THE NECESSITY OF CHRIST'S DEATH 413 







hh this principle has been taken — Paul’s juristic 
eology, the world of chivalry, of commerce, of legis- 
, and of a priort speculation. Some of these sources 
y more appropriate illustrations of Christian truth 
a others ; but none of them may properly determine 
rm of a Christian doctrine of salvation; no one of 
n can supply a content for the consciousness of Jesus 
e the law for the interpretation of his life and death. 
us’ death to be explained from himself or from some 
or source of light? Here lies the deepest difference 
x theories. Here is where the ways part. 


CHAPTER IX 
THE SATISFACTION OF GOD IN THE WORK OF CHRIS 


Ir is one of the principal contentions of the y 
theories of atonement that in the work of Christ, ¢ 
specifically in his death, a satisfaction or reparatior 
made to God on account of human sin. This so 
“objective element,” or “ Godward reference” of Chr 
sufferings, is the one constant factor in the theories wl 
are commonly called orthodox. But the agreer 
among these theories is, as we have had occasion 
tice, only formal. Anselm, Grotius, Edwards, Shedd, L 
Lidgett — all assert “objective” satisfaction ; but 
will be found to be no agreement among these write! 
to the occasion or nature of this satisfaction. This 
cumstance not only detracts considerably from the f 
of any argument e consensu, but easily occasions confu 
and misunderstanding in expositions and discussions 
the subject. 

The differences of view to which we here allude 
very naturally from the difficulty of conceiving and de 
ing the sense in which God can be the object ofas 
faction by means of Christ’s sufferings. Of course, 
general idea which the historic theories try to construe 
apply is that by Christ’s death some effect was wrot 
upon God whereby he was enabled to do what, otherwis 
he would have been unable, in consistency, to do. 
precisely what was this effect, and what is the ratic 
of it? How and why should the death of Christ ae 
plish it? On these questions the greatest divergence 
view have appeared, giving rise to rival theories wh 
closely considered, are as irreconcilable with each 
as are the “objective” and the “ subjective” type 
explanation, 





414 



























SATISFACTION OF GOD IN THE WORK OF CHRIST 415 


Now if it is correct to say that, on account of sin, God’s 
| anger is implacable until he has either punished it in full, 
or inflicted sufferings equivalent to sin’s penalty upon 
some one who takes man’s place, and that Christ’s suffer- 
ings were the vicarious substitute for man’s punishment, 
then it is easy to see what is meant when it is said that 
those sufferings constituted an objective satisfaction to 
God. In that case they appeased and placated his wrath; 
they propitiated and quenched his indignation, thereby 
enabling him to be merciful, as he could not otherwise 
have been. This is the strict penal theory of satisfac- 
tion. It is the post-Reformation doctrine and the theory 
of such modern Calvinistic divines as Drs. Crawford, 
| Hodge, and Shedd. In my opinion it deserves this com- 
“mendation, that it is the clearest and most consistent 
attempt to apply frankly and fearlessly the idea of a satis- 
ction rendered to God by the suffering of a substituted 
ctim. As we have seen, there are objections to it, such 
as that it is founded on a heathen and not on the biblical 
‘ conception of God,—to say nothing of the specifically 
Christian conception, —and that it predicates a most as- 
founding separateness of Christ from God, in view of the 
t that they had been previously defined as partaking 
eternally in the same essence; but with these objections 
We are not now concerned. It is doubtful if the theory 
Was ever carried out in strict consistency; certainly most 
xpositions of it display important concessions and quali- 
fications of its principles, the most common being in the 


|) and “as it were.” Nevertheless, it is a heroic attempt, 
‘and those who hold, with whatever inconsistencies and 
|| aberrations, that Christ vicariously endured the penalty 


propitiatory satisfaction to God’s wrath. I revert to this 
theory here only for illustrative purposes. Happily there 
ttle occasion to argue against it ; its statement is its 
icient refutation. 

































416 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


than by appeasing his appetite for punishment. Anselm’: 
was one of these. God was satisfied by the death of Christ 
because his dignity was thereby sustained ; Christ’s suf 
ferings afforded a reparation to his offended honor. How 
this could be we need not stop to inquire. It was made 
possible to the mind of Anselm by his regarding the life 
of Christ as a precious gift which he presented to God 
a gift whose value outweighed the enormity of sin. This 
gift so gratified the Sovereign’s sense of his dignity that 
he saw fit, in consideration of it, to overlook the insult 
offered him by human sin and to reward the giver by 
conferring salvation upon those who attach themselves t¢ 
his person. Closely considered, Anselm’s is the most 
anthropomorphic of all the historic theories of satisfaction 
The private dignity of the Sovereign, the traffic betweer 
him and his Son, and the payment of surplus merits 
men, are not characteristically biblical conceptions. The 
Cur Deus Homo is wonderfully acute, but its plausibility 
disappears when one no longer believes, with the medizyal 
metaphysics, 1 in the substantial reality of logical concepts. 
It is a masterly juggling with abstractions. Imagine 
Christ making a present of his life to God, and God i 
turn presenting him with salvation to distribute to hi 
followers, because he is so well satisfied by the gift; 
imagine this, I say, as an account of Christ’s saving mis 
sion. Such is the “objective” satisfaction made to God’ 
honor in the theory of Anselm ; Christ’s death is an act of 
deference to his dignity —a compliment, one may call it 
so gratifying that it allays all resentment and even move 
the Almighty to generosity. But the point to be observed 
here is that Anselm’s is not a consistent, unqualified 
“ objective satisfaction ” theory after all. It is only quasi- 
objective. Anselm’s most fundamental propositions are 
usually qualified by an “asif.” It is as ¢f sin affeete 
God thus and so, and as if he received a compensating 
gratification. I will add that to me it seems as 
Anselm dimly discerned the unreality of his own reason 
ing. At any rate he strikingly illustrates the difficulty 
and unclearness with which the idea of satisfying God 





—— 





oe 


ga 














| SATISFACTION OF GOD IN THE WORK OF CHRIST 417 


ab extra was applied by a thinker of great subtlety and 
~ acuteness. 


The Grotian theory has a still different conception of 


| the satisfaction which is afforded to God by the death of 
Christ. Here the death of Christ satisfies God because 
it is an act of homage to his law and government. It 


illustrates, not his determination to punish, but his zeal to 


Maintain the majesty of his moral rule. God is satisfied 
when his authority is vindicated in the sufferings and 
death of the Redeemer. It is evident that this is a com- 


promising, mediating theory. It lacks the clearness and 
definiteness of the penal view. I will not repeat the 
criticisms already made upon it, but simply call attention 
to its unclearness at the point in question. The notion 


of placating God’s wrath is weakened down into that of 
asserting the justice of his government. The Grotian 


view has, indeed, the important advantage of discarding 
the monstrous idea of an appeasement of God; but the 
conception which it substitutes provides no clear answer 


to two questions: (1) What can be meant by vindicating 


those abstractions called God’s law and government? and 
(2) Assuming the feasibility of such a vindication, how 


does Christ’s death, contemplated as a penal example, ac- 


complish that end? What is the “law” of which the 


| rectoral theory speaks? Probably it is, in theory, the 


moral rule of God in general, but in reading the writings 
of its advocates one gains the impression that it is, in 
practice, the Mosaic legislation. In any case, how is God 
propitiated by having his “legislation” vindicated, and 
how should this legislation require Christ’s death? I can 
conceive the idea that God may be gratified at having the 
Mosaic law obeyed, but this notion falls far short of an 


| “objective” satisfaction which so appeases his wrath that 
|| he does not need to appease it further in punishment. 


The advocates of the penal theory maintain — correctly, 


| as I think — that the rectoral theory is a halfway house 


in which reflective thought can never permanently rest. 
Let us put the question to the test by reference to a con- 


| crete example. All will agree that among modern theolo- 
































418 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


gians there is no more masterly logician than the elde 
Edwards. In his treatise on The Necessity of Satisfactic 
for Sin he begins by saying that God must either punisl 
sin or else there must be rendered to him some compensa 
tion which shall balance the greatness of the injury done 
Instead of saying with the penal theory: God must pun 
ish all sin, either in the persons of the guilty or in th 
person of some innocent substitute, he introduces the ide: 
of another course of action than punishment which is sup 
posed to answer the divine purposes equally well —some 
“other compensation” which will support his “ rectora 
justice” as adequately as punishment would do— whie 
will “magnify the law and make it honorable.” Now as 
suming that all this is entirely intelligible, it is also purel 
formal The crucial question is: How, in actual fact, d 
the sufferings of Christ serve this end? How did the 
take the place of punishment for sin and thus “objec 
tively ” satisfy God’s hostile feeling toward moral evil a 
well as punishment would have done? Or, as Edward 
puts it: How did Christ “bear the wrath of God” ant 
so satisfy for sin? 

To this question Edwards answers that he could dos 
“in no other but these two ways”: (1) He had “a grez 
and clear sight of the infinite wrath of God against 
sins of men, and the punishment that they deserved,” a 
(2) He “endured the effects of God’s wrath.” Chris 
had in his own heart and experience an acute realizatio 
of the evil of sin; he saw it as God sees it and condemneé 
it in his feeling as God condemns it. He bore the burde: 
of our sins through that sympathetic identification witl 
us which his love accomplished. He endured God’s wratl 
“in the sense he had of the dreadfulness of the punish 
ment of sin.” By his experiencing the effects of God’ 
wrath Edwards means that God dealt with him as # h 
had been angry with him, though, of course, he was not 
He forsook him on the cross, “ withholding from him th 
pleasant ideas and manifestations of his love,” although 
that time, as always, he “infinitely loved him.” Thu 
says our author, Christ suffered the wrath of God “in sue 


~ 


























SFACTION OF GOD IN THE WORK OF CHRist 419 


yay as he was capable of,” but explains that he was not 
pable of ” suffering it at all in reality, since “God did 
hate him but infinitely loved him.” Christ suffered 
f under the wrath of God —“ as though he had been the 
ect of God’s dreadful wrath ”— and this quasi-endurance 
ath Edwards is able to call the “full and complete 
alent of what we owed to divine justice for our 
” 

is not strange that this exposition, despite its use of 
old terminology about necessary punishment and equiv- 
t satisfaction, was felt to be a fatal weakening of the 
Protestant doctrine. In my opinion it was a com- 
e surrender of it. An equivalent punishment in 
ist's death — however energetically asserted —is not 
mtained; instead, we have a substitute for punish- 
t% which is not punishment, but is regarded as 7¢ it 
e. The theory reduces to two principles: (1) Christ 
ectly realized the heinousness of sin and the justice of 
’s condemnation of it, and (2) He suffered the effects 
God’s wrath in the sense that he suffered as if he were 
object of that wrath, though he was not. 

‘he first of these propositions is one of the main con- 
fions of the moral theory, and in the exposition of it 
ds has given classic expression to the fundamental 
ciple of that theory in words already quoted else- 
re, “A very strong and lively love and pity toward 
miserable tends to make their case ours; as in other 
ects, so in this in particular, as it doth in our idea 
lace us in their stead, under their misery, with a most 
ly, feeling sense of that misery, as it were feeling it 
them, actually suffering it in their stead by strong sym- 
hy.” How much “objective” satisfaction to God, in 
‘sense of the penal theology, is there here in this idea 
ist’s perfect moral identification with us, “ by strong 
athy,” in our misery andsin? Obviously, none at all. 
principle yields no propitiation to wrath. The sym- 
tic identification which love accomplishes doubtless 
es, but it does not placate, God. In its relation to 
70d's moral nature, this procedure and experience of love 


420 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 


do not render him gracious, but show how gracious he 
They are a disclosure or revelation of the nature of ( 
and in that sense a satisfaction of it, but not in the se 
of an appeasement or placation of anger. 

Apparently conscious that the first “way in wh 
Christ was capable of bearing God’s wrath” utterly fa 
to meet the theoretic requirement of an equivalent e¢ 
pensation to justice, which had been asserted, Edw 
evidently meant to fill the gap by the definition of 
second “ way.” This is the substitution of Christ’s suf 
ings as if they were penal, for sufferings which would 
been really penal. The difficulties here arise from 
unclearness and moral unreality of the explanation. 4 
the laborious preparation — comprising fully two-thi 
of the Essay —for a demonstration that the suffering 
Christ constituted a full and precise equivalent (be 
infinite) to the penalty due to man’s infinite sinful 
it seems a “lame and impotent conclusion” to be told 
he endured indirect effects of God’s wrath, by sufferin 
though he were really enduring the wrath itself. 
realistic language of Edwards in which he pictures ¢ 
as permitting the devil to “torment the soul of Ch 
with gloomy and dismal ideas,” seems rather to enh 
than to relieve the moral unreality of the conclusion. 
Christ could really experience the wrath of God, it is 
to see how he could placate that wrath; but I submit 
the assertion that he could placate that wrath by suffei 
as if he were experiencing it, is neither clear in itself 
easily believable in the absence of evidence. 

That this alleged endurance of certain indirect ef 
of God’s wrath amounts to the suffering by Christ of 
plenary punishment of sin — quod erat demonstrandt 
I must leave it to the reader to judge; to me it seem 
fall far short of it. But waiving this point, what is 
evidence that Christ endured the effects of God’s wi 
with the purpose or result of procuring his favor am 
removing obstacles to forgiveness? It must, in candoi 
said that the only apparent evidence is furnished by 
initial definitions which are framed by the author ov 














% 
‘SATISFACTION OF GOD IN THE WORK OF CHRIST 421 


his own inner consciousness. I do not forget that biblical 
passages are cited in supposed proof; but I think that the 
most ardent admirer of Edwards would admit that their 
application defies all known principles of scientific inter- 
pretation. I will give one example. Edwards regards 
the assertion that Christ suffered the full punishment of 
ih “or offered that to God which was fully and com- 
letely equivalent to what we owed to divine justice for 
: sins,” as being conclusively proved by Ps. Ixix. 5 :— 


“O God, thou knowest my foolishness ; 
) And my sins (guiltinesses) are not hid from thee.” 





t is evident, says Edwards, from numerous New Testa- 
ent passages, that Christ is here speaking, and that he is 
lescribing the sin and guilt which God imputed to him 
nd vicariously punished in his sufferings. Apart from 
ny estimate of this “ proof,” it will be noticed that it is 
uleged to prove more than the author’s argument at- 
empted, namely, an actual punishment of sin in the suffer- 
ngs of Christ. This incongruity is typical, and illustrates 
jhe difficulty which the great theologian found in explain- 
sng and applying his idea of satisfaction. Now God is 
atisfied by wreaking vengeance; now by having his dig- 
ity honored; now by having his rectoral justice acing ws 
iidged. The Essay of Edwards is penal satisfactionist, 
\nselmic, and Grotian in turn, and also contains the ele- 
ents of the moral interpretation of Christ’s work. The 
\nselmic notes are incidental. Leaving these aside, we 
ay say that the definitions and main argument are penal 
‘atisfactionist, and the conclusions contain a mixture of 
ne rectoral and moral theories. It would not be easy 
|) name a treatise of equal length on the atonement which 
ontains so many incongruous elements. It is a Grotian 
difice built upon a penal basis, with Anselmic and ethical 
mbellishments. Why this extraordinary combination of 
}iiverse explanations of our Lord’s saving work? Why, 
not because of the difficulties inherent in the idea of a 
Topitiation of God from a state of wrath to a state of 


|.ercifulness, an appeasement of his anger so that he may 



























422 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINI 


be at liberty to forgive, which the Essay undertakes 
explain and to justify? 
If the reader who may have been unable to receive ' 
penal theory of propitiation finds the doctrine of satisf 
tion as expounded by Grotius and Edwards also unpa 
ble, there is little likelihood that he will be much bet 
satisfied with more recent expositions of the recto 
theory. If Grotius and Edwards could not make it pl 
and convincing, we may well suspect that what is requi 
is, not better advocates, but a better case. We 
briefly adduce, however, one or two more recent ill st 
tions of the effort to explain how Christ’s death wrou 
some effect upon the nature or feeling of God which re 
dered possible, facilitated, or conditioned the action of | 
grace. 
In his Essay on Atonement in Lux Mundi, the 1 
Bishop Arthur Lyttelton lays down the proposition t 
“the death of Christ is the propitiation of the wrath 
God” (p. 285). We naturally ask: How and why ? I fin 
difficult to obtain aclear answer. The nearest approxit 
tions to it are made in the following statements: “In 
death of Christ a manifestation was made of the righteo 
ness of God, of his wrath, the absolute hostility of | 
nature to sin” (p. 290). The writer goes on to say tl 
“this manifestation of divine justice might have be 
made by mere punishment ; it became a: propitiation, 
that he, the self-chosen victim, by his acceptance of it” 
what ?), “recognized the righteousness of the law wh 
was vindicated on the cross” (p. 290). “ He was involv: 
so to speak, in all the consequences of sin, even to 
enduring of the very sufferings and death which in us; 
the penal results and final outcome of sin” (p. 
Remembering, now, that Dr. Lyttelton energetic 
rejects the theory of vicarious punishment as a “terri 
misconception” (p. 807), does he really answer the quest 
which we have proposed ? Does he show how Christ’s de 
propitiates God’s wrath? Formally stated, his reply 
that in the death of Christ God revealed the righte 
ness which otherwise would have been manifested 













































SATISFACTION OF GOD IN THE WORK OF CHRIST 423 


mishment. Is this properly called a propitiation of 
yrath? Is an involvement “so to speak” in the conse- 
nces of sin any proper equivalent to the penalty due to 

? But even if it were, can it be proved that Christ 
as conscious of experiencing his sufferings and death 
n the place of the world’s penalty and as a substitute 
‘or it, which had the purpose commonly associated with 
jenalty, namely, the assertion of vindicative justice? No 
‘ne doubts that Christ’s work was a manifestation of God’s 
‘ighteousness in his life and death. The question is: 
Was it a manifestation of retributive righteousness, made 
‘s a substitute for penalty? Can it be shown to have 
yeen so in the consciousness of Christ, or in fact? If it 
n, Dr. Lyttelton has certainly missed his opportunity 
a his essay. 
Mr. Lidgett, while purporting to base his doctrine of 
atisfaction primarily upon the conception of fatherhood, 
‘till asserts an “ objective ” propitiation. He holds that 
tisfaction is made by an act which is, among other 
ings, “an offering of homage and reparation to the law.” } 
Yo make this satisfaction, Christ met and submitted him- 
elf to “the manifestation of the wrath of God against 
n.” To him death came “charged with the utmost 
ower to express both the wrath of God against sin and 
| he undoing brought about by sin” (pp. 272, 274). Christ 
| tasted to the full of those penal conditions which reveal 
ne wrath of God against sin.” The author even goes so 
| ir as to speak of Christ’s “submission to the punishment 
hich expresses the mind of the Father and asserts the 
| wpremacy of the law” (pp. 269, 282). 
‘| These definitions may be clearer to others than to my- 
lf, but I experience great difficulty in assigning any 
itelligible meaning to such phrases as “a reparation to 
e law,” “ Salient to a manifestation of wrath,” and 
ting of penal conditions.”2 These terms forcibly 


| + The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement, p. 268. 

| 2 Since writing the above I have observed that Dr. Tymms confesses 
same difficulty of understanding these assertions of Mr. Lidgett and 
harmonizing them with his general position. See The Christian Idea 
Atonement, p. 454. 


424 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRD 
remind me of the statement which one often hear 
defences of the “ Godward reference” of Christ’s de 
that his sufferings exerted an effect on the relation of | 
to sin or sinners. If terms of this sort are capable of 
clear explanation, it is much to be desired that some of 
able writers who use them should furnish it. When o 
they were explained, the next task would be to add 
some evidence of their truth. If Christ’s sufferings 
manifested God’s wrath as to be a substitute for the wor 
punishment, there ought to be some available proof of 
fact in his words and deeds. If his sufferings had 1 
character, Christ must have known it, and if he knew 
substitutionary suffering to be the primary object of 
mission on earth, it is incredible that he should giv: 
expression to that knowledge. The fact remains the 
gave utterance to no such idea. There is no evidence t 
he possessed any such idea. The only apparent proc 
the contrary is derived from his exclamation, in the w 
of a Psalm, on the cross. Surely it is preposterous 
suppose that Jesus should give no clearer expression t 
this is alleged to be to the chief meaning and main | 
pose of his life-work. The truth is that the concep 
that Christ’s sufferings were substituted for man’s pun 
ment for the sake of expressing and so propitiating the wi 
of God, is the product of dogmatic tradition and is § 
ported by no known fact in the life or words of Jesus. 
a speculative theory and has no basis in history. Hen 
is necessarily set forth by naked assertion since it is ¢ 
ble of no proof. A few isolated texts are indeed § 
moned to its aid ex post facto ; but in most modern k 
which undertake its defence, it retains its place thro 
the sheer force of tradition and association, the only 
grounds on which it can be consistently held haying 
entirely abandoned. 

This brief review will suffice to illustrate the dri 
thought, within traditional lines, on the subject of a s 
faction rendered to God by Christ’s sufferings. Prop 
tion has been weakened down to an act of homage to law 
God is no longer represented as the recipient of a ram 



























ATISFACTION OF GOD IN THE WORK OF CHRIST 425 


or reparation by which his wrath is assuaged, but as ap- 
peasing himself by self-expression. Atonement has become, 
n in writers of unchallenged orthodoxy, an expression 
yindicative justice which is conceived to coincide with 
e revelation of the divine grace and to accompany and 
dition its exercise. And this is called the “ objective 
for,’ the “Godward effect,” of Christ’s work. The 
elation of God’s mercy is “ subjective,” and the parallel 
ation of his holiness is “ objective.” I am making no 
plaint of the course which theological thought has 
en, but it does seem to me unfortunate that writers 
atonement should still continue the use of traditional 
ms whose meaning has either wholly changed or wholly 
appeared. To propitiate God means to make God mer- 
. If we mean that, let us use the phrase; otherwise 
. An “objective atonement” in the traditional dog- 
fic sense means an appeasement of which God is the 
bject ; if we mean that, let us say so; but to insist upon 
use of the term “objective” to denote one aspect of 
fod’s self-revelation in Christ as over against some other 
t of it, is utterly confusing and baffling to all clear 
eussion of the subject. If all that is meant by “ objec- 
* is that God in saving men makes evident his right- 


Sreturn to the main issue. If the penal view of substi- 
on and satisfaction is morally intolerable, and if the 
sipenal views are too vague to admit of clear state- 


ch appears to me at all tenable, except that which 
yards defines as substitution “by strong sympathy.” 
y mind, Christ made our case his own by his “ very 


uffered for us by suffering with us. “In all our afflic- 
o he was afflicted.” “ Himself took our infirmities, and 
our diseases,” spiritual as well as physical. His suf- 
gs were vicarious, but their vicariousness was the 
































426 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINI 


Now since the conception of satisfaction is determi 
by that of the substitution which lies behind it, I coneh 
that God was satisfied in the work of Christ in the se 
of self-expression and self-satisfaction in sacrifice. Goc 
satisfied in revealing his nature and in achieving in 
world the ends of his wisdom and holy love. The not 
of a satisfaction ad eztra, a satisfaction of which he is 
object, an appeasement or placation of his wrath throv 
some innocent person’s experience of punishment, or of 
equivalent of punishment, is morally intolerable w 
clearly and consistently held, and vague and undefina 
in proportion as its harshness and immorality are explain 
away. God never needed to be atoned into love, nor 
he ever require from his perfectly holy Son the endurai 
of unspeakable suffering as a substitute for sin’s pena 
for the vindication of his honor or his government. 
was satisfied in the work of Christ because it is the natur 
of the divine love to give, to serve, and to suffer with 4 
for its objects. But Christ’s sufferings neither had + 
character of punishment, nor did they serve the end 
retributive justice. They served the ends of holy — 
which stoops to conquer sin and serves and gives to 
uttermost because it is at once supremely benevolent 
supremely holy. 

Substitution “ by strong sympathy” and satisfactie 
self-sacrifice — that is a summary statement of my con 
sion. But how justify so daring an aberration from ¢ 
matic tradition? On what grounds are such definiti 
maintained? I answer: Chiefly on two grounds, 
one ethical, the other historical. (1) These are the ¢ 
notions of substitution and satisfaction with which I 
associate any ethical reality, and (2) they are the ¢ 
conceptions of these subjects which I can deduce from 
words of Christ and from the facts which are know 
us concerning ‘his consciousness. Christ, so far as 
know from the Gospels, never conceived of himself 
bearing men’s sins by a literal or legal substitution ; 
suffered for the guilty, not at the instance of puni 
justice, in order to placate God, but at the instanet 
























ATISFACTION OF GOD IN THE WORK OF CHRIST 427 


inite love in order to reveal God and to bring the life 
God to bear upon the life of man. And this Christ 
done as no other ever did. He has perfectly exempli- 
d the Godlike life—the life of sacrificial love. He 
shown us that it is a law of the divine perfection, and 
refore a law of universal application. It is the law for 
man life, because it is a law of the divine nature. 
the heroic devotions of earth are but illustrations of 
‘It is the dying which ends in fuller life, the self- 
ying which yields a fruitage of victory and joy. And 
fy? Because it is the law which God has impressed 
bn creation, and it is lodged in the heart of the world 
seause it lives and reigns forever in the heart of the 
srnal Love. 


“ A picket frozen on duty, — 
A mother starved for her brood, — 
Socrates drinking the hemlock, 
And Jesus on the rood; 
And millions who, humble and nameless, 
The straight, hard pathway plod, — 
Some call it Consecration, 
And others call it God.”! 


us next raise the question, whether the theories 
lich so energetically repudiate these “ subjective ” views 
insufficient, do really succeed in carrying through the 
fon of a satisfaction of which God’s wrath or penal 
hteousness is the object. We will begin with the 
sory of vicarious punishment. We must first broadly 
tinguish righteousness and mercy. The former is the 
d pro quo principle in God which requires him to 
nish all sin to the full—so much penalty for so much 
m. The exercise of grace is conditioned upon the execu- 
nof that penalty. Christ takes it upon himself and 
3 by satisfying the divine wrath against sin fulfils the 
adition on which alone forgiveness can be granted. Of 
his satisfaction God is said to be the object ; but, in the 

f analysis, is he? Who originated this scheme? God 


1 Each in his Own Tongue, by William Herbert Carruth. 


428 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN! 








himself, of course. ‘Grace drew the wondrous plan.” T 
doctrine is, then, that God in his love provided a way | 
which his punitive justice might be satisfied. The “plan 
originated with him and was the expression of his natul 
He was the subject of the satisfaction before he was fl 
object of it. He could never have been satisfied by 
he had not first been satisfied with it. His anger cou 
never have been appeased if his love had not found a w 
to appease it. God acts in the matter of man’s salvati 
before he is acted upon. A subjectivity lies behind t 
alleged objectivity. God himself originates the sche 
which appeases him. It would seem, then, that he must 
disposed to be appeased in advance. Everything go 
back to the divine love after all. The alleged objectivi 
of the satisfaction provided is only a name for the ref 
effect of God’s own thoughts and purposes. God’s just 
is appeased because in his love he determined to be 
peased. This is a conclusion to which Augustine, w: 
all his legalism, was driven, and even Calvin quotes 
words with approval. “God did not begin to love 
when we were reconciled to him by the blood of his Soi 
but he loved us before the creation of the world, 
we might be his children, together with his only begott 

Son, even before we had any existence. Therefore 
reconciliation by the death of Christ must not be u 
derstood as if he reconciled us to God, that God mig 
begin to love those whom he had before hated ; but } 
are reconciled to him who already loved us and y 
whom we were at enmity on account of sin.”! Elsewh 
Augustine writes: “Was it indeed so, that when God 
Father was wroth with us, he saw the death of his § 
for us and was appeased toward us? Was then his § 
already so far appeased toward us that he even deigt 
to die for us; while the Father was still so far wre 
that except his Son died for us, he would not be appease 
Unless the Father had been already appeased, would 
have delivered up his own Son, not sparing him for 
But I see that the Father loved us also before, not 0} 


? Quoted from Augustine by Calvin in the Institutes, Bk. II. ch. xvi 

























SATISFACTION OF GOD IN THE WORK OF CHRIST 429 


before the Son died for us, but before he created the 

world.” ! 

' The point to be observed here is that in relation to 

the work of salvation the love of God is made original, 
primary, and determining——even though we must add 


love was limited and partial. In his grace God origi- 
gates the ways and means of satisfying his righteousness. 

In his love he determines how he will have his justice to 
‘be satisfied. Now how could he do this “unless,” as Augus- 
jtine says, “he were already appeased”? We have then, 
on this penal theory, this curious paralogism: If God 
had not been already appeased (at least toward the elect) 
before Christ died to appease him, he could never even 
lave conceived the plan by which he was appeased. The 
eory insists that God was propitiated by Christ’s death, 
but is compelled to admit that unless he had been eter- 
ally propitious in feeling toward mankind (or, in the 
Calvinistic view, toward the elected) he could never have 
opted the measures by which he was _ propitiated. 
aiving all questions of consistency here, and without 
sing ethical difficulties, is it not clear that, even in the 
mal theory, God is the object of the alleged satisfaction 
orded him in Christ’s death only after he is the subject 
d author of it; that God satisfies himself by originating 
d executing a plan of grace for sinners; that, in the 
t analysis, the satisfaction of God is a satisfaction, not 
a0 extra, but ab intra? Back of all satisfaction which is 
jpposed to remove the obstacle to the operation of grace 
s the fact which, if propitiation be needed, is alone 
mpetent to originate it, or make it possible, namely, 
hat, even while we were yet sinners, God confirmed a 
we which he already cherished for us in the fact that 
Christ died for us (Rom. y. 8). That God should give 
he supreme proof of his love in providing an appeasement 
his justice which, ex hypothesi, is an insuperable ob- 
le to the exercise of his grace, may be to some minds a 
jelear and illuminating conception; but I am compelled to 


1 On the Trinity, Bk. XIIL ch. x1. Cf. pp. 139, 140. 


430 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 



























confess that to me it is singularly opaque. I can only 
of it what Boso said in reply to one of Anselm’s 
tions: “ Verba ista cogitare et dicere possum; sed sé 
sum eorum ita cogitare nequeo, sicut falsitatem 
possum intelligere veritatem esse.”! The only consic 
ation which I am here urging is that, on the per 
theory’s own showing, the so-called “ objective” propi 
ation has its only possible basis and ground of exis 
in a “subjective” propitiation whereby “ before Chri 
died for us God was already appeased.”? 
If it is difficult for the penal theory to carry ¢ 
consistently the idea that God was the object of a sati 
faction accomplished by the sufferings and death 
Christ, it is for the vice-penal theories quite impossibl 
These theories hold that it was necessary, in the inter 
of God’s law or his holiness, that, while manifesting I 
grace to sinners, he should also assert and vindicate 
righteousness at the same time. He must show himse 
just, while justifying the ungodly. He must mainta 
his self-respect in providing forgiveness so that he m 
not seem lax or lenient in his treatment of sin. The 
theories further hold that, in some way which is not ma 
very clear, Christ’s death afforded such a vindication 
holiness as was necessary. His sufferings were subs 
tuted for men’s punishment and sufficed the same e 


1 Cur Deus Homo, I. 19. 

2 Dr. James Morison illustrates well the difficulty of carrying out 
idea of propitiation. He declares that since the appeasement of his ji 
tice in the death of Christ ‘‘God is now willing and ready and eager 
forgive.’ But was he then, before that event, unwilling ? The a 
is that his previous state of mind was that of ‘‘a desire to be willing 
forgive.’’ Exposition of Romans Third, p. 305. We have, then, this + 
traordinary procedure : God ‘‘ devises a scheme of propitiation *’ by wh 
his desire to be willing to forgive is transformed into an actual willi 
ness. I must leave to experts in psychology the question, whether w 
one desires to be willing to do a thing, he is willing or unwilling 
it. Compare the words of the Psalmist which Dr. Tymms aptly quo 
in his comments on Dr. Morison’s explanation: ‘* Unto Thee, O Lo 
do I lift up my soul, for thou art good and ready to forgive”? (IXXXVi. | 
According to the penal theology he ought to have said, ‘‘for thou : 
good and desirest to be willing to forgive.’’ Cf. Tymms, The Chrisi 
Idea of Atonement, p. 225 sq. 



























SATISFACTION OF GOD IN THE WORK OF CHRIST 431 


namely, to assert God's holy displeasure at sin; but they 
yere not of the same kind with punishment — they were 
jot strictly penal, nor did Christ endure the wrath of 
zod. Now the question which I raise here is this: Is 
ot the satisfaction of God, as thus conceived, really 
a satisfaction by revelation or self-expression? If you 
say: Im order to be satisfied, God must reveal his 
ighteousness as well as his grace, is not this satisfaction 
as subjective in respect to the righteousness as it is in 
espect to the grace? God is Riiehied: on this theory, 
y what he himself does, not by anything done to him. 
| He is satisfied by revealing his total nature and by accom- 
| plishing man’s salvation in accord with the demands of 
hat nature. I submit that this is not properly described 
$ a satisfaction, wrought by another, of which God is the 
ject. 
; The formal principle of these theories, that in the 
) work of salvation God must show himself hostile to sin, 
| as 5 well as gracious to sinners, all theories admit and main- 
ain. It is, indeed,a truism. It is inconceivable that 
od should undertake the salvation of men at all if sin 
ere not heinous and hateful to him; there would be no 
tive to salvation if God approved sin or was indifferent 
t. ‘The very idea of salvation implies his hatred of 
sin. But when the effort is made to deduce from this 


experiencing something analogous to punishment, 
siderable difficulties beset the argument. If it is said 
t Christ confesses the heinousness of sin on man’s 
alf, or that he performs some act of homage to the 
ine righteousness, or experiences the effects of sin in 
own sinless person and thus reveals its hatefulness — 
this would be but a concomitant revelation of the evil 
in accompanying the effort to save men from it. It is 
a propitiation or placation of God’s wrath viewed as 
obstacle to forgiveness, but a revelation or acknowl- 
ment of his displeasure at sin and of its ill desert in 
very act of providing salvation from it. The rectoral 
ories from Grotius onward seem to me to provide for 




















432 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


a subjective satisfaction only —a satisfaction of God 
righteousness by a revelation of it in the work of Ch 


punishment or that any such substitute was necessary, 
a presupposition which was carried over from the pe 
theory and one under which the theories in question 
place no logical foundation. Hence it is natural that th 
penal suffering of Christ is usually described in the 
theories as penal, “as it were,” and that the objectiy 
satisfaction which they assert is objective, “so to speak. 
The conclusion of the whole matter, to my mind, is thi 
Desert the strict penal equivalence theory of atonemel 
and you logically end in the moral theory. 

I trust it will be apparent from the preceding remar 
that I repudiate the ideas of a propitiation or placation 
God’s wrath in the sufferings of Christ, the removal | 
hindrances to forgiveness by his sufferings, the substiti 
tion of his death for the penalty of sin, and the accomplis 
ment of an “objective” satisfaction of any kind wroug 
upon him ab extra. I hold, on the contrary, that Ge 
was satisfied in the work of Christ because in and throu 
that work he accomplished the ends of his holy love | 
salvation. The saving work of Christ satisfied not o 
attribute of God by acting upon it from without, but h 
total nature by revealing it and realizing in humanity i 
gracious and holy requirements. The atonement is “ol 
jective” if by that is meant that Christ is the Reveal 
and Mediator of a divine work of holy love whi 
grieves and suffers on account of sin and yearns to sa 
men from it. He is the Representative of God who do 
for us what we could not do for ourselves. In him y 
see the life of God illustrated; through him we kne 
God as our Father and are brought to the knowledge 
ourselves as his children. 


CHAPTER X 


ETERNAL ATONEMENT 
























_ IF God is essentially and eternally love, and if he has 
_ been saving men ‘throughout the whole history of our 
tace, then there must be some real sense in which he has 
_ ever been reconciling the world unto himself. If atone- 
ment is an activity of the divine love in relation to human 
"sin, a self-satisfaction of God in the rescue of sinners, a 
_ triumph of love in forgiveness, then God must have been 
| atoning for human sin during the whole history of man- 
kind. We have seen that it is impossible to limit God’s 
provision and activity for man’s salvation to one single 
historic transaction without logically excluding from sal- 
vation all who lived before its occurrence. But this 
would be a conclusion as unbiblical as it is revolting to 
all enlightened ideas of the divine character. We must 
therefore conclude that the word “ atonement ” represents a 
_ process and not merely a single event — that it designates, 
the operation in history of certain laws or forces of the 
divine life which are perpetually operative, an action of 
) God in relation to sin and salvation which has been con- 
|| tinuous throughout human history. 
This idea of eternal atonement has not received at the 
) hands of theologians the attention which its importance 
) deserves. Indeed, the older treatises on the subject 
rarely, if ever, allude to such an idea. They prevailingly 
conceive and represent atonement in a purely transactional 
| Sense, frequently limiting the import of the term to one 
single event — the death of Jesus on the cross. A num- 
ber of recent writers, however, of various schools and 
tendencies, have expressed the conviction that the saving 
work of Christ cannot be thus narrowly conceived with- 
s 433 








434 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


. out entailing the most intolerable conclusions. They hay 
seen that if the historic work of the Saviour is a revela 
tion of the nature of God, it must represent ways an 
means of his activity which are perpetual. It is q 
impossible to suppose that God’s moral nature was fe 
many centuries quiescent, or that some attributes or mode 
of action held sway down to a certain date and that thei 
others came into play. Inshort, if the word “ atonement 
designates any act, process, or method of God which i 
necessary to salvation at all, the very fact that God ha 
always been saving men proves that it is a continuous an 
perpetual affair and not a single transaction or event. 

The idea of atonement under consideration is not neces 
sarily, and has not in fact been, identified with am 
particular theory of redemption, though we shall hay 
occasion to see that it is distinctly unfavorable to certail 
theories, if, indeed, it could be adjusted to them at al 
It implies, as will appear directly, some approximation t 
the Patripassian “heresy ” and is not at all germane t 
the idea of a propitiation of God ab extra. It is doubtles 
due to circumstances like these that it finds little or m 
recognition in the older theories ; I do not recall so mue 
as an allusion to it in any exposition of the penal theory; ii 
principle it is probably quite as alien to the rectoral theory 
strictly construed, as to the theory of vicarious punish 
ment. Its occasional recognition by advocates of thes 
theories may probably be taken as indicating, either th 
they have modified the views with which their names ar 
commonly associated, or that they have fallen into a 
inconsistency of which they are not aware. 

It may be useful, at this point, to illustrate the idea i 
question by a few citations from writers of somewhi 
varying views. It finds forceful expression in Presiden 
Strong’s later utterances on the subject of atonemen 
Speaking of the objection which the transactional vie) 
raises to the theory under consideration, namely, thai 
according to the latter, “Christ’s atonement has not cease 
his sacrifice is perpetual, and so long as sin exists Chris 
must suffer,” Dr. Strong replies : “I accept all the con 






ETERNAL ATONEMENT 435 





















squences, and I affirm that the Scripture gives me warrant 


rso doing. A God of love and holiness must be a God 
f suffering just so certainly as there is sin.” “I need 
resent atonement as much as the patriarchs did.” It 
rue, continues the author, that “the idea of Christ 
ering in and with the whole sinning and groaning 
@reation, bearing sorrow on account of wicked men,” is 
eign to immature Christian thought, but “it is none the 
rational and scriptural.” 1 Again he declares that by 
e of the natural and essential relation of Christ to 
nkind, ‘it is impossible that he should noé suffer, that 
e should not make reparation, that he should not atone. 
e incarnation and death of Christ are only the outward 
temporal exhibition of an eternal fact in the being of 
d and of a suffering for sin endured by the preincar- 
e Son of God ever since the fall. The patriarchs and 
phets were saved, not so much by the retroactive effect 


nt which was even then in progress. The historical 
mement is the objectification of the eternal suffering 
eof God.”? It will be observed that these views of Dr. 








as Dr. Strong would say, of his endurance of God’s wrath 

and (4) the capacity of God to suffer. There is room 
wide differences of opinion regarding these points of 
trine which he associates with the theory under review. 
the judgment of many the theory would not necessarily 
olve these accompanying conceptions. The only point 
is relevant to the present inquiry is that Dr. Strong 
asserts the fact of eternal atonement and grounds it 


cipal A. M. Fairbairn has developed the view that 
imearnation “is to us the externalization of what was 


Article on “Ethical Monism”’ in The Examiner for October 31, 1895. 
' The Examiner, November 15, 1894. 


436 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 
























innermost in God, the secret of the Eternal manifested 
time.” “Sin was, as it were, the sorrow in the heart 
his happiness. Theology has no falser idea than that. 
the impassibility of God. If he is capable of sorro 
he is capable of suffering; and were he without 
capacity for either, he would be without any feeling 
the evil of sin or the misery of man. But to be passib 
is to be capable of sacrifice ; and in the presence of s1 
the capability could not but become the reality. TI 
being of evil in the universe was to God’s moral natu 
an offence and a pain, and through his pity the misery 
man became his sorrow. We may, then, construe a 
sufferings and death of Christ as if they were the saer 
ments, or symbols and seals, of the invisible passion al 
sacrifice of the Godhead.”! Dr. Fairbairn denies, ho 
ever, what Dr. Strong asserts, that the sufferings 
Christ had a “penal character,” and maintains that th 
express to us that satisfaction which God makes of | 
entire ethical nature — righteousness and love alike —} 
revealing his character in self-sacrifice and by recoyerl 
the sinner from sin to holiness. 

The idea of eternal atonement, as opposed to the trai 
actional conception, underlies Dr. Bushnell’s theory 
vicarious sacrifice as a fact of universal validity @ 
application. He holds that there is “a cross in Gor 
perfections from eternity.” “The whole Deity is 
vicarious sacrifice —in it from eternity and will 
eternity be. We are not to conceive that our bless 
Saviour is some other and better kind of Deity, a G 
composing and satisfying God; but that all there is 
him expresses God, even as he is, and has been of old 
such a being in his love that he must needs take our ev 
on his feeling, and bear the burden of our sin. N 
there is a cross in God before the wood is seen upon © 
vary ; hid in God’s own virtue itself, struggling on heav 
in burdened feeling through all the previous ages, and strt 
gling as heavily now even in the throne of the worlds 


1 The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, pp. 483-485, passim. 
2 Vicarious Sacrifice, p. 73 (ed. of 1866). : 


ETERNAL ATONEMENT 437 
























yr. Clarke maintains the same view, on the same 
rounds. Speaking of the satisfaction of God in the 
ork of Christ, he declares: “There is no question 
ere of satisfying law or punitive justice. But there is 
question of satisfy? ing God himself, the same God who 
s ever bearing sin ‘ae he may save sinners. Such a God 
ould not be satisfied without opening his heart to those 
yhose sin he was bearing. God is eternally satisfied with 
suffering of love for sinners, and desires that it may 
e the place of all other suffering for sin. In reality, 
God was doing and bearing, in his own heart, all that was 
aecessary on the divine side to the saving of the sinful. 
If we choose to apply the word ‘ atonement,’ eternal atone- 
mt was made, and is made, in the heart of God. God’s 
n sin-bearing satisfies God, and his exhibition of it in 
Shrist completes his satisfaction.” 4 

Before passing on to consider its grounds and impli- 
fions, I will adduce one other example of this mode of 
ught. In a striking sermon, entitled Eternal Atone- 
#, Dr. Roswell D. Hitchcock raises the question as 
the meaning and nature of the biblical saying, “ God is 
e.” He answers that it is the best summary of God’s 
ral character, that love is the root of all his moral 
ibutes and activities. Love explains creation, as well 
demption. But what must be the feeling and action 
bf a God of love toward sin? Dr. Hitchcock answers : 
1*God feels it, and has always felt it. Absalom has 
ken his father’s heart; and we are Absalom. The 
d old king goes up over Olivet weeping, with his 
covered and his feet bare; and that king is God. 
he is the King eternal, and his agony over ‘si is also 
al. This agony of God over human sin is the Lamb 
from the foundation of the world. God himself 
es, to himself atones ; and so atonement is both eter- 
and divine. ” ? 

t will have been observed that in several instances the 
ates of the idea of eternal atonement have affirmed, 













1 Outline of Christian Theology, pp. 348, 349. 
2 Eternal Atonement, p. 11. 


| 
| 


| 


438 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


or plainly implied, that it is a scriptural conception ; 1 
us now inquire on what grounds this contention rest: 
The question here is not, of course, whether such a gel 
eralization was elaborated during the first age in the fort 
in which modern thought conceives it, but whether ¥ 
meet in the New Testament the elements of which it” 
composed. To me it seems clear that the earliest spee 
lative thought is found to be moving in this directic 
Take, for example, Paul’s idea of the cosmic Christ. 
his mind Christ is present and operative in the wor 
from the beginning ; he has been active in the enlighter 
ment and guidance of the human race throughout 
whole history. The spiritual rock of which Israel drat 
was Christ (1 Cor. x. 4); the same power of God un 
salvation which afterward appeared in human form W 
present in Israel, and if in Israel, why not elsewhere, sin 
God is not the God of the Jews only? Again, if “ Chris 
designates for Paul the agent or power operative in er 
tion itself, and if God has revealed himself, in va ic 
ways and degrees, throughout the whole history of t 
world, must it not follow that there have been a presei 
and activity of Christ in the world from the beginnu 
and if an activity, surely a saving activity? For 
“ Christ ” means not merely the historie person whom 
call by that name, but the principle (apyn) of the ere 
tion (Col. i. 15-18) and the medium of a world-wi 
reconciliation (Col. i. 19, 20). 

For the writer to the Hebrews Christ’s is an etenm 
priesthood, an office independent of time, a function whi 
is not conditioned upon descent or appointment, but is 
ercised through the power of an indissoluble life. 1 
most striking peculiarity of this author is his interpre 
tion of the historic work of Christ sub specie ceternitat 
The word “Christ” is not to him merely a name for a 
torical character, but a designation of an eternal Po 
behind the world and above time, through which God 1 
been active in human life from the beginning. And 
Christ’s is an eternal priesthood, so is it perpetual. Ch 
ministers now and always in the upper, heavenly tem 






ETERNAL ATONEMENT 439 























mm man’s behalf as truly as he ministered for us while here 
Sth. With all his emphasis upon the earthly life of 
s, this author translates all the specific and historical 
s and experiences of Jesus into universal terms. 
BP cctional is grounded in the eternal and reveals 
illustrates it. Behind the temporal acts and services 
hrist for men lie the heavenly realities. In the blood 
e sacrifice made on the cross we discern the offering of 
elf unto God by virtue of “an eternal spirit” of sac- 
al love. Above the temporal sanctuary in which he 
tercedes for us on earth rises the heavenly temple where 
he ever liveth to make intercession.” 
An analogous circle of ideas—formally different but 
sentially similar—meets us in the Johannine writ- 
gs. There we are taught that God is love and that the 
tivities of this love are in perpetual operation. For 
is type of thought, also, Christ is the medium or principle 
Flove’s action. He is the divine Word, God’s mode of 
f-revelation in illuminating and saving the world. He 
e light of men universally —the light which lighteth 
y individual man (Jn. i. 4,9). Israel was “his own 
sion” by virtue of his presence in the life of the 
ation, and among the heathen also there were scattered 
hildren of God whom he would gather into his flock (Jn. 
i. 52). Christ the Revealer of God and Saviour of men 
|pes not begin to be at Bethlehem, and does not begin to 
ork for men in Galilee and Judea. The self-revealing 
inciple in God which at length came to fullest expres- 
in the life of Jesus Christ is an essential factor of the 
ne essence. This divine, eternal Word enlightens 
ery man and is the inspiring principle of all religion 
ll goodness. ‘ His writing is upon the wall, whether 
Indian fane or of the porticoes of Greece. All 
is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, comes 
him.” ! 
y the one point which I am at present concerned to 
ate is this: Behind the historic Jesus and his earthly 
nm early Christian thinkers saw a perpetual revealing 


1J. H. Newman, The Idea of a University, pp. 65, 66. 


































440 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRIN 


and saving activity of God; in the transactional # 
saw the eternal ; they sought to translate the partie 
acts and experiences of Christ into terms of univel 
divine law and action ; in the historic Christ they ree 
nized the cosmic and eternal Christ. 

Now I am well aware that these references to apost 
Christology raise many important and difficult questi 
as to the way in which the passages referred to should 
interpreted and estimated. It would carry us far bey 
our present purpose to discuss these questions. Is 
personification of the preéxistent Christ to be a 
strictly or rhetorically ? Is the eternal Christ of Pau 
John a person or a principle? Is the New Testam 
doctrine of preéxistence a metaphysical theorem or @ 
ligious estimate? These are questions which haye b 
quite too easily settled in traditional theology, with hi 
or no consideration or knowledge of the import and his 
of the preéxistence idea in the religious thought of 
tinian and Alexandrian Judaism. The texts in que 
have long been subject to dogmatic treatment ; no 
length the historical method has begun to be applie 
them. But whatever the issue on the Christolog 
questions involved, our result is secure. There is 
activity of God in all history of which Christ’s ear 
work is a historical expression. His saving mission 
transactional expression of eternal atonement. ; 

There is another class of biblical representations wit 
while formally different from those which we haye ju 
reviewed, seems to me to illustrate the same fundament 
principle; I refer to the teaching concerning the i 
cession of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. In the Fo 
Gospel the intercession of Christ appears as a part 0 
ministry on earth; yet it looks far beyond that min 
into the future and contemplates a work of grace great 
than the present. The earthly ministry of Jesus 181 
garded as but a beginning; it is to be carried forwa 
perpetually by the operation of the Spirit. Jesus hm 
self will come to his own in greater power than ever an 
guided and inspired by a divine Presence, they wil 


{ 


kh 
ax 


i ETERNAL ATONEMENT 441 


greater works than he had done while on earth. In a 
word, there is to be a continuous work of Christ in the 
world of which his saving mission on earth constituted 
but the beginning. Now this work is ascribed to his 
promised presence, or coming, now to the gift and guid- 
ance of the Spirit. But, in any case, it is a continuation 
of his earthly life and labor; it is done in his name, that 
is, on the lines of his historic life-work. 

What we have here, then, is a vision’of a saving activ- 
ity of which Christ’s earthly labors and experiences were 
but a part. What he has been doing for men on earth 
is to be carried forward continually. Men are to be led 
nore deeply into the truth, that is, into the realization 
£ that oneness with God in which he lived —into the 
fellowship of those sufferings which express the law of 
he divine life. Whatever be the metaphysics of the doc- 
rine of the Spirit, its religious meaning is, that Christ’s 
york is not a finished, but a continuous work, and that 
hrist did on earth, under the forms of human experi- 
nee, only what, in principle, the Father is ever doing. 

In other passages the continued work of Christ, or of 
jhe Spirit of Christ, is represented under the figure of a 
ediation or advocacy at law. As Christ was an Advo- 
ate before God with reference to our sins (1 Jn. ii. 1), 
othe Spirit is another Advocate. In the upper, abiding 
actuary Christ perpetually intercedes for our salvation 
Heb. vii. 25). In Paul it is the Spirit who makes inter- 
# for the saints with unutterable groanings (Rom. 
ii. 26,27). What are these but forms of thought, taken 
ln priestly mediation, or from legal advocacy, to ex- 
ess the truth that the divine agencies employed for our 
|\lvation in the historic work of Christ are still and ever 
erative — that God is always doing what he did in a 
decial manner in the life-work of Jesus —an illustration 
the generic idea of eternal atonement ? 
| It can hardly be necessary to insist that such a con- 
¢ption as that of the intercession is obviously figurative. 
|| is a realistic mode of representation — probably sug- 
ested by the Jewish priesthood — of the continuousness 















































442 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRID 


of that saving activity which is illustrated in the li 
work of Jesus. The Christ of history is the Christ 
to-day and of all days. The life and work of the Savio 
on earth represent the laws and ends of God’s perpet 
working. This is realistically expressed by saying tl 
Christ intercedes for us. The Spirit of Christ year 
over us in deep and eager interest. Christ perpetual 
comes to us, dwells in us, works for us. Is not the” 
ligious kernel of such ideas this, that the purpose 
Christ’s life on earth for us discloses the constant purp: 
and perpetual operation of God in our salvation? V 
ever else they may mean, the forms of thought which 
have been considering illustrate the truth that the say 
work of God is not so much a single fact as a const 
method of divine action, and that the earthly life 2 
suffering of Christ are the historic form of an ete! 
reality, a perpetual process. Can we form any cone 
tion of that reality? Can we frame any intelligible i 
of that process ? ; 
~ To me the words “eternal atonement” denote the di 
less passion of God on account of sin; they mean | 
God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer —that sin grie 
and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffe 
consequence of it. It results from the divine lov 
alike from its holiness and from its sympathy — that * 
all our affliction he is afflicted ” (Isa. lxiii. 9). A 
ment on its “ Godward side” is a name for the grief am 
pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. 
- this divine sorrow for sin the afflictions of Christ al 
revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish whicl 
experienced on account of sin, we see reflected the } 
and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love. 4 
_Christ’s work is grounded in an eternal fact —the sin 
bearing and suffering of God. In whatever sense Chris 
was the Representative of God so that in him men 
the Father, in whatever degree he was the interpreter 
example of the divine feeling toward sin, in that § 
and degree his suffering with and for men in their sin 
its ground in the vicarious suffering of the eternal 








ee 








a 


ETERNAL ATONEMENT 443 


Of course, this conception of eternal atonement implies 


| the passibility of God. Technically this is, indeed, a 
| heresy, but it is noticeable that it is one which orthodoxy 
itself has not been able to escape in case it ventured to 
advance beyond the heathen notion of an appeasement of 


God ab extra. If it is said: Christ is God, or one of the 
three persons who together compose God, then how can 


the conclusion, that God suffers in consequence of sin, be 
avoided? To say that Christ suffered in his human na- 
' ture but not in his divine nature, would involve a dismem- 


berment of his personality which would ill agree with the 


traditional definitions of the unity of his person. Accord- 
ingly we find that some of the most orthodox theologians 


— the most uncompromising champions of penal satisfac- 
tion even—have virtually admitted the passibility of 
God, when they have thought their problem through be- 
yond the preposterous idea of an appeasement of God from 
without. Dr. Shedd, for example, arrives at the conclu- 
sion that God himself suffered the penalty of sin — that 
God punished himself in the person of his eternal Son. 
However paradoxical this may appear, it is worth noting 
that, formally considered, it has a point of contact with 
the conception of eternal atonement. Both affirm a suffer- 
ing of God in consequence of sin, Dr. Shedd ascribing to 


that suffering a penal character —a punishment of God ! 


—while modern theology views it as the suffering which 
arises from paternal love. There is “a judicial infliction,” 
writes Dr. Shedd, “of God’s own providing and of his 
Own enduring in the person of his Son.” He “conciliates 
his own holy justice toward the guilty.” ‘“ The propitiation 
is no oblation ab eztra, no device of a third party, or even 
of man himself to render God placable toward man. It is 
wholly ab intra, a self-oblation upon the part of Deity 
itself, by which to satisfy those immanent and eternal im- 
peratives of the divine nature which without it must find 
their satisfaction in the punishment of the transgressor, 
or else be outraged.”! In this view, God suffers what 
man deserved to suffer ; God punishes himself instead of 


1 Theological Essays, pp. 266, 272. 


444 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTR a E 








punishing man, and thus satisfies justice out of his ow 
pangs, “ himself the judge, himself the priest, himself th 
sacrifice.” I am only concerned here with the sing! 
point that the most ultra orthodoxy is driven, in the 
analysis, to the conclusion that God can only be appease 
in the sense of appeasing himself by self-sacrifice — the 
he can only satisfy his appetite for punishment by himsel 
enduring it. Dr. Shedd himself evidently feels the diff 
culty connected with the idea of a self-punishment of Goe 
He calls this method of substituting God for man in pun 
ishment an “ extraordinary method,” and admits that th 
conception that divine justice demanded for its satisfactiol 
the crucifixion of one of the persons of the eternal Trinit) 
requires for its acceptance the most heroic “ will to h 
lieve.” “It is,” says Dr. Shedd, “so strange and stupen 
dous, that it requires very high testimony and proof t 
make it credible.” 4 

Dr. Bushnell very naturally discovered a point of con 
tact between his own conclusions and those of Dr. Shedd 
For both “ propitiation”’ was self-propitiation ; God satis 
fied himself in self-sacrifice. It may be doubted whethe 
Dr. Bushnell’s efforts, in his later years, to elaborate an 
apply this idea are much more satisfactory than those ¢ 
Dr. Shedd ; but, in any case, they illustrate how thinker: 
the most diverse in tendency, were driven back upon 
subjectivity lying behind objectivity in atonement, an 
how both alike, though in different ways, made use of th 
idea of a suffering of God on account of sin. Dr. Bus 
nell’s explanation of God’s self-propitiation has never bee 
regarded as very clear or satisfying. In attempting t 
approximate to orthodoxy by asserting not only a recon 
ciliation of men to God, but of God to men, he asser 
that the bestowment of forgiveness must always be at 
companied in the person providing the forgiveness, by 
making cost to himself in suffering, expense, or painste 
ing sacrifice or labor. Forgiveness is possible “ onl 
by the help of some placation or cost-making sacrifice. 


1 Dogmatic Theology, I. 447. 2 Forgiveness and Law, p. 58. 
3 Op. cit., p. 40. 


ETERNAL ATONEMENT 445 





‘Suffering is with all moral natures the necessary corre- 
late of forgiveness.” Hence in providing forgiveness God 
“must atone himself into the gentleness and patience of 
love.” This self-atonement by cost or suffering is propi- 
lation. But it proceeds entirely from God’s love, and “is 
mnly designed to work on other unreducible sentiments that 
hinder his love, in forgiveness it might otherwise bestow.” ! 
Dr. Bushnell seems in these passages to be approximating 
she governmental theory, though he relates the alleged 
sropitiation, not to God’s law, but to certain “ unreducible 
sentiments”’ which obstruct the operation of his love. 
hat these were and how the death of Christ availed to 
May them, he was not very successful in showing. But 
t is noticeable that the attempt proceeded upon the ideas 
nderlying eternal atonement. ‘There is,” he says, “no 
uch thing as date in God’s dispositions” (p. 59). ‘The 
ransactional matter of Christ’s life and death is a specimen 
hapter, so to speak, of the infinite book that records the 
ternal going on of God’s blessed nature within” (p. 60). 
e is by his nature a sufferer for sin, and that suffering 







snot momentary, but dateless and perpetual. 

The idea of a sin-bearing passion of God, which is coeval 
mith the fact of sin, implies that love in God and in man is 
[sentially the same. It is the very nature of love to give, 
|) serve, and to suffer with and for its objects. Love is 
[ne great burden-bearer, and when those toward whom it 

















mes a burden of pain and grief. If this is not the nature of 
/ne divine love, then that love is absolutely different in kind 
om anything that the human heart has ever known, is 
tterly unintelligible to us, and is neither reflected nor 
‘iterpreted in the love of human experience. But such 
conclusion would be utterly intolerable. It is a love 
| to our own — only immeasurably aoe ne a 


oss and passion. If Christ lived a life of service, giving 
miself without stint to bless and save men, it is because 
iis really Godlike so to do; if he lived a life of vicarious 


1 Op. cit., pp. 48, 49, 54. 


}) exercised are in misfortune and misery, that burden be-* 









































446 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


sympathy and suffering, bearing men’s griefs and carryi 
their sorrows, it is because there is a great compassion, 
which all human tenderness is but a faint reflection, in t 
heart of the Eternal; if Christ gave his life in utmo 
sacrifice for men, it is because there is in the being of Ge 
himself the possibility of vicarious suffering which, so f 
from marring his blessedness, is one of the elements 
that matchless perfection whose name is love. 

If, now, we may regard as established a conclusion | 
which thinkers of such varying tendencies agree, namel 
that there is a suffering of God on account of sin, y 
character and significance shall we assign to it? TI 
mystical theory answers by identifying Christ with Gc 
on the one side and with man on the other. Christ is 
once God and the natural “root” of humanity. | 
relation to mankind is said to be analogous to the relati 
of the head to the other members of the body. Now wh 
men suffer for sin, he also suffers with them in their suff 
ing. This is a passion of God, since Christ is God, and 
is a suffering for sin which is felt wherever sinis. TI 
suffering of Christ on earth is but a historic example 
it. But it is held to be a penal endurance of the cons 
quences of sin by mankind in the person of its head 
representative. This, if I understand it well enough 
state it correctly in my own words, is the theory whi 
Dr. Strong has expounded in his later writings.1_ I wi 
not attempt to discuss it. I can form no intelligible con- 
ception of its definition of Christ as being at once one of the 
persons of an eternal Trinity and the “sum” or “root” 
humanity. Nor does the illustration drawn from the relati 
of the various parts of the physical body serve in the le 
degreetoilluminatethesubject. But all criticism apart, the 
scheme reduces to this : God must punish sin ; his justi 
requires that there should be suffering on account of 1 
this suffering he inflicts upon himself, or upon a part of him- 
self (Christ) ; but inasmuch as Christ is also the sum 
humanity, it is therefore inflicted upon man who dese 
it. The twofold use of “Christ,” in this theory, as now 


1 Christ in Creation, passim. 


ETERNAL ATONEMENT 447 


equivalent to God and now to humanity, reminds one 
of Anselm’s argument: As God Christ can pay the debt ; 
as man he is obligated to pay it. Those who may under- 
stand this metaphysical mysticism better than I can profess 
to do, may be better satisfied with it. It seems to me, 
however, to solve the problem to which it addresses itself 
only formally ; in that respect also it closely resembles 
Anselm’s theory. If I may so express it, Dr. Strong 
seems to me to explain the relatively unknown by the 
absolutely unknown. The explanation is tenfold more 
i 








mysterious than the problem. It resembles many exposi- 
tions of the Apocalypse which are far more incomprehen- 
sible than the book itself. Instead of interpreting the work 
of Christ on the analogy of the nature and action of love 
as known in human life, it constructs forthwith an incom- 
prehensible definition of Christ in the interest of the 
maxim that God must and does punish all sin. Christ 
__ ean be punished because he is humanity ; but he is also 
' God. Can he be punished as such? God can suffer ; 
can he suffer penally ? Can God punish himself for his 
own satisfaction ? 

The question which we have just raised Dr. Shedd, as 
we have seen, answers affirmatively. God himself, in the 
person of his eternal Son, is the victim of the divine 
vengeance upon sin. God must punish, and his grace is 
seen in the fact that he does not punish the guilty, but 
punishes himself instead. I have not observed that Dr. 
Strong follows his own logic quite so far. His two-sided 
definition of Christ enables him to speak of the Christ who 
is the sum of humanity when punishment is in question, and 
from this point of view the Christ who is God is in abey- 
ance. But Dr. Shedd knows nothing of this double Christ 
who is humanity for human purposes and God for divine 
purposes. Hence for him the principle of an ab intra sat- 
isfaction, coupled with the maxim: “God must punish,” 
leads straight to the conclusion : God punishes himself, or, 
more realistically expressed : the divine justice required as 
a satisfaction for sin the crucifixion of one of the persons 
of the eternal Trinity. 


SS 


| 
| 
| 


























448 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


Such is the conclusion to which the most logical modern 
advocate of vicarious punishment with whom I am ae. 
quainted is driven by his premisses: God must punisl 
all sin, and: If he does not punish man, he must punish 
himself. The divine suffering on account of sin is, then, 
retributive, vindicatory. God avenges himself on him- 
self; in his mercy he determines to satisfy his penal 
righteousness by expending his wrath upon himself. Cer- 
tainly no one will dispute Dr. Shedd’s assertion that it 
requires a heroic faith to believe this. I should say that it 
would require a capacity for belief to which all things are 
possible — including the acceptance of the self-contradie 
tory. I shall not argue against this conclusion. Those 
who have followed the argument of this book with the 
slightest sympathy would properly regard any effort to 
refute it as gratuitous; those who could accept it—if 
such there be —I should expect to find impervious to 
argument. A self-punishment of God! This is the 
reductio ad absurdum of penal satisfactionism. 

The suffering of God on account of sin is not penal; 
is not a special pain inflicted by the Almighty upon him 
self in order to satisfy his retributive justice; it is not a 
device for overcoming his “ unreducible sentiments,” 
a method of removing obstacles to forgiveness. The 
passion of God on account of sin arises from the very 
nature of holy love in the presence of that moral evil” 
which corrupts and destroys the objects of that love. 
God does not suffer what man deserved to suffer in order 
that man may escape suffering ; he suffers the affront 
which sin offers to love —the pain which sin inflicts upon 
his heart. This suffering does not enable God to be gra- 
cious; he is gracious already and always. It is not a 
single event, but a perpetual fact. It evinces and illus- 
trates the holiness of God and the evil of sin as nothing 
else could do, but not as a substituted retribution. Which 
reveals the more forcibly the evil of a wicked son’s life, — 
the penalties which the father in his indignation seeks to 
visit upon him, or the sympathetic sorrow which breaks the 
father’s heart? How does it the more clearly appear that 

















ETERNAL ATONEMENT 449 


_ the father is a righteous man — by his fixed determination 
| to punish either his son or himself, or by the agony of his 


moral nature over the sin which is ruining an object of 


| his love? 


Eternal atonement is not a condition precedent of God’s 
_ saving sinners, but an aspect of the love that is ever 
yearning and seeking to save them. The moment it is 
admitted that atonement is a name, not for a single event 
which took place on a certain day centuries ago, but for 
_ a dateless and perpetual fact conterminous with sin, that 
“moment it becomes apparent that righteousness and 
benevolence are always in union and codperation in salva- 
tion — that they do not rival, checkmate, or hinder one 
another, but that toward sinners God is and ever has been 
at once gracious and holy—ever ready to forgive, but 
never ready except on the terms which holiness pre- 


' scribes. The very idea of forgiveness implies inviolable 


holiness, since it involves the testing and condemnation™ 


_ of evil by the standard of absolute rectitude. An unholy 
_ being thinks lightly of sin and condones it because indif- 
ferent to it; but a forgiving God is one who repudiates 
the evil. Nothing speaks more loudly of the heinousness 
of sin than forgiveness. Only a holy God can forgive. 


| Only a holy God can suffer for sin. Would you see what 
sin is and what holiness is? Behold the sorrow which sin 
| brings to the heart of God, and the judgment which the 


_ very fact of forgiving love passes upon it! Sin is no- 
where so condemned as in the suffering of holy love in 
consequence of it and at the bar of God where it is con- 
_ fessed and forgiven. 

Eternal atonement means that God is ever the same and 
deals with mankind at all times according to the same 
_ principles and laws. His laws are the uniform methods 
of his action; his attributes are the changeless perfec- 
_ tions of his character. To suppose that at some particular 


1 “ Condemnation is not only a prerequisite of forgiveness, but is actu- 
ally implied, and inevitably contained in the very act of forgiveness 
itself, for this act has no relation to what is blameless.” Tymms, The 
Christian Idea of Atonement, p. 50. 


¢ 


’ 



















450 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


time he does something, either to himself or to some one 
else, which enables him thereafter to act differently from 
what he otherwise could have done; to represent him as 
doing something to satisfy one attribute so that it may 
no longer impede the action of another; to imagine that 
one day he completed a provision for man’s salvation — 
such notions are the crudest anthropomorphisms. I sub 
mit that it is more rational to suppose that the nature ¢ 
action of God are in principle ever the same; that if he 
is now willing to save men, he always has been willing; 
that if he is actually saving men to-day, he has ever been 
saving them through the operation of the same holy love; 
that if Christ revealed God in his sympathetic, suffering 
and saving love, he revealed him as he was in the begin- 
ning, is now, and ever shall be. 

Such are some of the consequences of viewing the action 
of God in respect to sin and salvation sub specie eternitatis. 
God performs no enabling acts; he does nothing for ulterior 
ends ; he makes no exhibits of severity to prevent giving a 
wrong impression ; he acts out his moral nature, which is: 
consistent, holy love. What he does is grounded in what 
he is. His historic revelations are transcripts of eternal 
fact. His mercy is from everlasting. His attitude tow 
ard mankind has never changed. His relation to sinners 
is the same in all ages. Always and everywhere he con- 
demns sin not chiefly by fiat or decree, but by suffering the 
wound which it inflicts. Always and everywhere he main- 
tains his righteousness, while revealing his grace, in for- 
giveness. The verdict of eternal holiness on sin is this, 
that it can never be forgotten, overlooked, or condoned ; 
it must be repented of, repudiated, and forgiven. 
















CHAPTER XI 
SALVATION BY UNION WITH CHRIST 


_WE have had occasion already to refer to Paul’s formula 
justification by faith. We must now inquire more par- 
ularly into its significance.! The apostle has three prin- 
al modes of describing the appropriation of salvation. 
hey are best represented by the phrases: justification by 
th, dying and rising with Christ, and being in Christ. 
hese are synonymous, if not perfectly identical, terms — 
criptions of the same religious experience. It would 
erefore be an unfair treatment of Paul’s thought to con- 
er any one of them apart from the others, or to construct 
doctrine of the Christian life upon inferences derived 
clusively from one of these modes of presenting and 
| illustrating the experience of salvation. 

_ The formula of justification is one which Paul derived 
from his Jewish education. It is frequently employed in 
e Old Testament and was one of the great topics of the 
abbinical schools. Formally considered, “justify” is a 
egal term and means to declare righteous, to acquit. It is 
term derived from the analogies of the law court. It 
plies that God acts as a judge or sovereign and, upon 
certain conditions, pronounces men exempt from blame or 






1 The relevant passages are reviewed in detail in my Theology of the 
o Testament, pp. 417-430, and I shall here take for granted a general 
niliarity with the texts. 

451 


























452 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINI 


the supererogatory merits of some pious ancestor. 
this was the theory of religion in which Paul had bee 
trained. It was the theory according to which his oy 
early efforts and struggles after peace with God were 
ducted. But he had learned its futility. He had fow 
that a deep and sincere moral nature which feels the e 
ceeding sinfulness of sin and clearly sees the lofty chars 
ter of the divine requirements, could never rest secure in 
the sense of its own achievements, especially when th 
chief stress was laid upon ceremonial acts as the primai 
demand of religion. The time came when this Pharisa 
scheme seemed to Paul to be a theory of salvation by meré 
whereas he saw that sinful men could be saved only / 
pure grace. Hence this former advocate of salvation | 
legal works became now its uncompromising opponent. 
But there was no occasion to repudiate the word “justify 
It was still a good and serviceable word. Paul believe 
in what it expressed — an acquittal from guilt, an accep 
ance into God’s favor —as firmly as ever. The questic 
now in dispute was not as to the fact, but as to the cond 
tion of justification. For the Pharisee that condition was e 
pressed by the word “ works,” meaning deeds of obediene 
to the Mosaic law, contemplated as meriting God’s favor 
for Paul the condition was faith in Christ. The problet 
as : How shall sinful man be just with God? The Phari- 
sees answered: By keeping the law ; Paul answered : 
believing on Christ. The difference lay not so much, if at 
all, in their different ideas of justification, formally con- 
sidered, as in their wholly different conceptions of the con 
dition of acceptance with God. 
Now our Protestant theology has shown a strong pref- 
erence for this Pauline maxim of justification by faith ¢ 
against the Roman Catholic emphasis upon participation 
in rites and ceremonies considered as conditions of salya- 
tion. To the Catholic mind the Protestant view has seemed 
one-sided because, it is said, it eventuates in the error n 
demned by James, a faith without works, which is dead 
To the Protestant, on the other hand, the Catholic theor 
of salvation has seemed to be only a Christianized Phari 






: SALVATION BY UNION WITH CHRIST 453 
‘saism — a doctrine of salvation by ceremonial acts which 
‘is in principle the very error against which Paul so ener- 
' getically contended. It appears to me that in this dispute 
- of Catholic and Protestant with each other and in the treat- 
ment by both of the Pauline doctrine, there has been a 
good deal of misunderstanding, confusion, and irrelevancy. 
It is a misfortune that the single category of justification 
which, from being a legal term, so easily gives rise to un- 
warranted inferences, has been so predominantly em- 
) ployed in discussions of the nature and conditions of 
salvation. It can only be rightly estimated when it is 
remembered, (1) that it is not one of the terms of Jesus’ 
teaching, (2) that it is not a prevailing term in the 
New Testament generally, and (3) that, even in Paul, 
the occasion for its employment lies in his polemic against 
Pharisaism. 

However well adapted the term “justify”? may be to 
express certain aspects of salvation— the completeness of 
God’s acceptance and forgiveness, for example — it is a 
term germane to a legalistic mode of theologizing, such as 
was characteristic of late Judaism. If unobjectionable in 
itself, it zs liable to carry associations and to give rise to 
inferences which ill accord with the Christian conception 


b) 


eee re 





ee ee ee eee 


1“ The relation of the soul to God has been viewed mainly in two ways. 
The one way is to compare him with light illumining an object. The 
other way is to view the relation between God and the soul through the 
analogies of the law court. God is either the judge or the prosecutor or 
the plaintiff, and the soul is the prisoner at the bar. It is to the legal 
bent of the mind of Paul that the forensic turn of so much Christian 
theology is due, and thousands of writers have occupied themselves in 
rabbinical disquisitions about justification without contributing one new 
thought either to religion or to law. Theologians have been engaged on 
the impossible task of reducing all the intimacies which grow out of the 
telation of the soul to God to a single type. The good citizen moves 
through life in a well-ordered state without entering the precincts of the 
law court, at any rate as a criminal. And theologians have treated the 
whole human race as if it were simply criminal, and nothing more. 
The same genius for law which built up the Roman code threw itself 
upon the analogous aspect of the religious life. Even the kingdom of 
God becomes in the theology of Calvin a huge system of arbitrary police, 

of which the government of Geneva offered the earthly type.” Frank 
Granger, The Soul of a Christian, pp. 246, 247. 


Oe ae 


@ 
































454 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


of salvation. Illustrations of this liability are seen in th 
doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to th 
believer and in the widespread notion of salvation as de 
pendent upon a passive acquiescence or an intellectua 
assent. These are deductions from the idea of a forensix 
acquittal which are as natural as they are unwarranted by 
Paul’s conceptions of the subject. All figures and anz 
ogies are liable to perversion and abuse, and Paul is not te 
be held responsible for those aberrations. But such one- 
sided applications of his language will best be avoided by 
seeing that he is wedded to no single term or thought. 
form, but has a varied and rich vocabulary for describing 
Christian experience. Much less does the New Testament 
as a whole employ any single word as a shibboleth. Le 
us note more particularly how the case stands in regard t 
the term in question. 

If it had not been for Paul’s controversy with the 
Judaizers and for the corrective offered to a perversior 
of his doctrine by the Epistle of James, there is no reason 
to suppose that we should ever have had the formule 
“justification by faith,” in theology. Paul employs it 
only in his polemic against the Judeo-Christian ten- 
dency to bind the burdens of legal observance upon the 
Christian conscience. It was a controversial watchword. 
When the apostle is expounding his gospel of grace inde 
pendently and constructively, he employs almost exelu- 
sively other terms to describe it, and especially the phrases 
mentioned, dying with Christ and living in Christ. These 
facts constitute no objection to the term in question, but 
they do show that when left to follow the bent of his own 
mind, the apostle instinctively turned to other modes of 
thought and expression and described salvation, by pref- 
erence, in terms drawn from vital processes and personal 
relations rather than in those derived from forensic anal 
ogies. The Epistle of James is evidently concerned to- 
correct an impression to which the doctrine of salvation by 
faith alone would be peculiarly liable — however unwar- 
rantably — namely, that a mere belief is all that God 
requires. Hence this Epistle would supplement faith 





if SALVATION BY UNION WITH CHRIST 455 
; 

by good works. But the good works which this author 
‘recommends are not the “works” to which Paul objects 
‘as conditions of salvation. James means by “works” 
deeds of Christian love and service, while Paul is speak- 
‘ing about acts of obedience to the Mosaic law contem- 
plated as entitling the doer to salvation. Nor do the 
two writers mean the same thing by “faith.” James 
means by it mere opinion or assent,—a “faith” which , 
‘devils may have and remain devils still,—while Paul 
means by it a living union with Christ. If, as some 
‘suppose, James was correcting Paul, he was correcting 
him only after radically misunderstanding him. It is 
more likely that the statements in James are aimed at 
‘a popular, but unwarranted, version of the doctrine of 
justification by faith only. 

' Much of the misunderstanding between Catholic and 
Protestant is of very much the same character as that 
‘which obtained in New Testament times. On the one 
hand, justification, legally considered, seems to be a mere 
formality ; therefore it must be made to mean, making 
/righteous, instead of, declaring righteous. Again, justifi- 
cation by faith alone seems equivalent to justification by a 
faith which zs alone. Hence to say that a man may be 
Justified without “works” is declared to be equivalent 
to saying that one’s religious opinions are the only 
}important thing, that salvation is In no way conditioned 
on a good life. On the other hand, Protestants often 
| exaggerate the Catholic doctrine by representing the 
good works on which it lays stress as consisting wholly 
of ritualistic observances. Now however much the Prot- 
estant interpretation of justification may have exposed 
pat to the criticisms referred to, it is certain that the 



















Pauline doctrine, rightly understood, is utterly opposed 
to the idea of salvation by opinion, however correct or 
important. 

It must be remembered, first of all, that the word 
“justify ” is an analogical expression, a figure of speech. 
it this legal figure were translated into its equivalent, 
forgiveness, many unwarranted inferences from it and 


456 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTE 


many disputes concerning it would be rendered 
plausible, if not quite impossible. Further, one 
remember what faith is for Paul. The apostle’s 
ception of the nature of faith should have saved | 
idea of justification from ever seeming to wear the appea 
ance of a mere formality or court process. Faith is a vit 
union with Christ, a living in Christ, which makes the b 
liever’s life a Christ-filled life. Now it is such a felloy 
ship with Christ which is the condition of justificati 0 
How, then, can justification, so conditioned, be a me 
formal affair? It is to be noted, too, that the form 
the Pauline doctrine is not, as the traditional theole 
has commonly held, the imputation of another's rigl 
eousness to the believer, but the imputation of t 
believer’s own faith to him for righteousness. F% 
never speaks of God’s imputing Christ’s righteousne 
to the believer; he states his doctrine of imputation 
three forms of words, all of which are used interchan 
ably and mean the same: (1) the believer's faith 
reckoned to him for righteousness; (2) righteousmi 
is reckoned to him on condition of faith, and (3) _ 
sins, when he accepts Christ, are no longer reckoned 
him. The first is by far the most frequent form— 
statement. The imputation of which Paul speaks is 
the imputation of faith, and the denial of this fe 

in traditional dogmatics! is due to a misunderstandi 
of Paul’s doctrine of faith. The denial sprang ire 
the feeling that if justification were defined as 
imputation of faith, that would mean that salvation 
based upon some act of man contemplated as merite 
ous. But the apostle’s favorite formula is open to 
such construction, since for him faith is the correlat 
of grace, and so far from being by any possibility a wort 
of merit, is the renunciation of all claims and merits @ 
the humble acceptance of a gift of grace. Paul's oft 
repeated maxim: “Faith is reckoned for righteousne 
































1 £.g. in the Westminster Confession, ch. xi.: ‘*not by imputing f 
itself, the act of believing, etc., as their righteousness, but by impu 
the obedience and satisfaction of Christ,’’ ete. 


SALVATION BY UNION WITH CHRIST 457 





would not have needed to be set aside if its implications 
had been correctly understood. It was natural enough, 
however, since the old Protestant conception of faith 
_ was so largely that of an acquiescence or assent, that 
| it should have been supposed that Paul had no pro- 
' founder idea and that, therefore, the faith of which 
he spoke was quite unworthy to be reckoned as right- 
" eousness. 

The question now arises: Why did Paul deem it fea- 
| sible that faith should be reckoned for, or as, righteous- 
ness? What did he mean by the imputation of faith? 
_ Righteousness is acceptance with God. But how can one 
| be accepted with God while sin still cleaves to him? Must 
| not one perform all the divine requirements in order to 
' be just in his sight? Yes, said the Pharisee, and these 
requirements are found prescribed in the Mosaic books, 
' especially in the ritual law. But, Paul would answer, the 
highest requirements of God are not ritualistic, but moral. 
Who dares to claim that he has loved God with all his 
heart and his neighbor as himself? Salvation by perfect 
obedience to the law of God, adequately understood, would 
mean salvation by sinlessness, and if man were sinless, he 
would not need forgiveness. But man is not sinless but 
sinful, and so sinful as to be morally powerless to do even 
the good which he approves and desires todo. It was some 
such course of thought which brought Paul face to face 
with his problem and opened the way to its solution. If 
| God saves graciously, he must save us, not after we have 
first become perfect, but while we are yet sinful; but if he 
saves righteously, he must save only on conditions which 
involve our entrance upon the way to righteousness and 
which guarantee the increasing attainment of righteous- 
: Both these conditions are met in the doctrine of 


SS SS 


salvation by faith in Christ. Faith means, not our per- 
fection, but our dependence upon grace ; but it also means 
our union with Christ, and that union with the perfect 
Life means aspiration after goodness, a fixed preference 
| for holiness, and assures its progressive attainment. In 
principle, Paul’s doctrine of justification is an amplifi- 










458 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTR INE 


cation of the beatitude of those who hunger and thir 
after righteousness. 

Faith is aspiration, the forward look, the inner y 
of the invisible. Faith in Christ is an eager desire to t 


truth and value of his type of life. It is the will tod 
God’s will, as Jesus reveals and interprets it. Justifiea 
tion by faith is God’s acceptance of the will for the deed 
Salvation is by aspiration, that is, by the choice an 
preference of the good. God accepts and treats us, ne 
according to what we are, but according to what w 
would like to be. The measure of the man in the eye 
of God is not his performance, but his desire. 


“ Not on the vulgar mass 
Called ‘work’ must sentence pass, 
Things done, that took the eye and had the price; 
O’er which, from level stand, 
The low world laid its hand, 
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: 


But all, the world’s coarse thumb 
And finger failed to plumb, 
So passed in making up the main account; 
All instincts immature, 
All purposes unsure, d 
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount: — 


Thoughts hardly to be packed 
Into a narrow act, 
Fancies that broke through language and escaped ; 
All I could never be, 
All men ignored in me, 
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.”2 


The attainment of righteousness in conduct and cha 
acter is a never ending process. Justification means thi 
God accepts us as righteous when we have entered on tk 
way of righteousness. Nor is this verdict of acceptance 
a mere Aceon it is the solidest moral reality. Height 
of moral achievement do, indeed, lie far beyond us and is 


1 Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra, xxiii.-xxy. 


SALVATION BY UNION WITH CHRIST 459 





high above us; but if ours is a genuine faith in Christ, we 
ere on the way to their attainment. The goal of Chris- 
hy "tian growth and effort may be yet far aw ay ae the Chris- 
a tian man; but if he has set it distinctly before himself, if 
he has Dehlusrately chosen it and set his heart upon a 
it is by anticipation his; he has “seized it with his eye’ 
t “he has grasped it in his purpose, and no matter how oe 
he may be from it to-day, he shall reach it if he presses 
_ steadily on. Faith is the clear sight of Christ in his true 
_ meaning for our human life; it is to see life and destiny 
| as he saw them, to measure values as he measured them. 
| 
} 





To see Christ is to see the world and life with something 
of his clear discernment and just judgment. In such a 
vision of Christ all possibilities of growth in his likeness 
are hidden. We can become like him if we can thus see 
him as he is; never otherwise. Faith is no arbitrary con- 
dition of salvation; it is the only conceivable condition * 
_ of a real attainment of Godlikeness. It is a choice, an 
| aspiration, a yearning for the good and the true, which 
_ opens the Kingdom of heaven to men. No spiritual good - 
| ean be ours until we desire it; nor will any be withheld 
| from us which through appreciation and preference we are 
capable of receiving. 
| When faith is viewed as mere belief, an acceptance of 
_ propositions, a holding of things for true, justification 
| does, indeed, have in it a note of unreality. Morally 
_ minded men can hardly be made to believe that the issues 
| of eternity are staked on an opinion. It is quite unlikely 
that any of our theories concerning the mysteries of the 
| spiritual world are correct enough to serve as an adequate 
| warrant of our moral safety and perfection here and here- 
after. Or, if faith be viewed as a passive acquiescence in 
the merit of another, which we hope to have reckoned 
over to our account, it is not strange that a putative 
righteousness of this kind should seem arbitrary and un- 
real. But I do not think that these objections can be 
justly brought against Paul’s doctrine of the imputation 
of the believer’s faith to him for righteousness. It is the 
conception of the nature of faith which determines the idea 











460 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 












of justification. The latter, considered separately, does 
easily lend itself to formal, fiat interpretations. It is this 
figure of a verdict or pronouncement underlying the word 
“justify” which has often led theology into a superficial 
formalism. It remained but to conceive of “ faith” as 
many had already conceived it in New Testament times, 
in order to arrive at the conceptions against which the 
Epistle of James inveighs —a mere theoretic assent and 
consequent unethical “ righteousness.” 

It is Paul’s conception of faith which, if understood, ef- 
fectually saves his doctrine of justification from all sueh 
unreality. It is, indeed, contrasted with “works ” in the 
legal sense attached to that term by Pharisaism, but so far is 
it from being opposed to works in the sense of good deed 
and services flowing from Christian charity, that it gives 
evidence of its vital power by love (Gal. vy. 6). Every- 
where faith is inseparably associated with hope and love 
It is an active, energizing principle. Dissevered from 


as to James. Were it but a belief, however heroic, 
would be morally profitless, unless undergirded and in- 
spired by love. “Though I have all faith, so as to re 
move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing , 
(1 Cor. xiii. 3). 

For Paul faith is union with Christ — entrance into 
fellowship of life with him. Between the believer and 
Christ there is a mutual indwelling. The man of faith 
is said to be in Christ, and Christ in him. Again, salya-_ 
tion is described as a dying with Christ on the cross and 
a rising with him in newness of life. These are simply 
Paul’s favorite forms of describing the experience which in 
his polemic with the Judaizers he calls justification. They 
are all terms for expressing the inception and nature of 
the Christian life. Faith in Christ, union with Christ, 
dying and rising with Christ — all these are synonymous 
phrases. And what do they mean? The answers ¢ 
theologians vary according to their differing theories ol 
salvation. To be in Christ, says the advocate of vicarious — 
punishment, is to take refuge in his substitution — to be- 





SALVATION BY UNION WITH CHRIST 461 


a 

lieve that he has paid our debt, endured our penalty, that 

we might not endure it; to be in Christ means to be 
covered with the robe of his righteousness—to have his 


merit imputed to us; our sins were laid on him and in 























_ their stead his righteousness is reckoned to us. To be in 
_ Christ is thus to be acquitted and exempted from penalty. 

To be in Christ, declares the metaphysical mystic, means 
exactly what it says. If we are in him, he must somehow 
include or embrace us. How this is, or can be, is gener- 
| ally explained by the use of illustrations. The New Tes- 
tament supplies examples. Believers are in Christ as the 
| branches are in the vine; they are related to him as the 
_ inferior organs of the body are to the head. Hence we are 
told that Christ is the head, or root, or sum of humanity. 
| But since we are supposed to be dealing here in exact defi- 
nition, we must ask : Which of these terms is to be taken as 
defining the subject in hand? There is a wide difference 
_ between the relation of the branches to a trunk and that 
of the members to the head, and a still wider difference 
_ between the “root” of a tree and the “sum” of its parts. 
| Were the biblical descriptions referred to intended as 
illustrative figures of speech, adapted to convey a practical 
impression of the supreme significance of Christ for reli- 
| gious faith and life, or as scientifically accurate definitions 
available for the purposes of a metaphysical theology ? 
If the latter were the case, then we must say that the 
' definitions do not define, for theology is never more im- 
| penetrable than when it essays to explain the believer’s 
| relation to Christ by a metaphysical application of these 
figures. They are of the same sort with those “monistic” 
_ explanations of our relation to God which assure us that 
our consciousness is embraced in the all-inclusive con- 
sciousness — that our personality must be regarded as 
“merged,” “fused,” “absorbed,” or “lost” in the Absolute.! 
They are of the same sort because they all have their 
roots in the same pantheistic philosophy. 

I must leave it to others to discuss, explain and under- 
stand these physical, quasi-physical, and metaphysical defi- 


1 See Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, passim. 


























4 
462 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE | 


nitions and descriptions of union with Christ. I mus 
content myself with trying to point out some of the mean 
ings which the plain man might be expected to appreciate 
and to verify in his religious experience. To me the tw 
great mystics of the New Testament, Paul and John 
seem to have held very practical views of what union 
with Christ means. It is worth while to note the connee- 
tions in which they have set the idea, and then we may 
inquire how the general result may be summarized. 

When, in the Epistle to the Romans, Paul had, in the 
earlier chapters, refuted the Pharisaic notion of justifica: 
tion by meritorious works and established his own counter- 
theory, he proceeds to explain what moral results are 


he has been defending. It seems to some, he says in 
effect, that my view of the futility of the law and of th 
way in which it “makes transgressions abound ” involves 
the conclusion that my doctrine implies a light estimate 
of sin. Far from it! exclaims the apostle ; the man who 
has intrusted himself to Christ as Saviour has thereby 
broken with his old sinful life as by a death (Rom. yi. 
2) ; he has been buried out of sight of the world in which 
he once lived and has been raised to a new and glorified 
life. To be united to Christ is to be severed from that 
sinful life which Christ repudiated and condemned ; it 
is to forsake the evil world and to enter Christ’s world ; 
it is to die unto sin and to live unto God; it is to live 
under the power of the motives, interests, and ideals 
which were enthroned in the life of Jesus and which he 
summarized in the words, “the Kingdom of God and hi 
righteousness.” This is what Paul meant by being 
Christ. 

And this relation to Christ involves the true freedom 
of the soul. When one becomes a servant of Christ, 
becomes a servant of righteousness, and bondage to right 
eousness is the true freedom of man. The apostle put 
this paradox very strikingly. In your old life, he says, 
you were bond-slaves of sin and regarded yourselves a 
free from the requirements of righteousness; now you 


. 
it, 


4 


: 


SALVATION BY UNION WITH CHRIST 463 


have become the bond-servants of righteousness and have 
become free from the power of sin (Rom. vi. 20, 22). 
After a description, in chapter vii., of the terrible conflicts 


_and struggles through which he passed in his search for this 


freedom and peace, he enters upon a fuller elaboration of 


its character and consequences in chapter vill. To be in 
- Christ is to walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. * 

















It is to be animated by the same Spirit of life which was 
in Christ ; it is to be spiritually minded, that is, spiritu- 
ally alive ; it is to possess the mind of Christ — to see the 
world and life with his eyes and to judge and value all 
things by his standard. To be in Christ is to possess 
the Spirit of Christ—to contemplate the world from 
Christ’s point of view —to look out into the future with 
Christ’s calm and confident trust. The Spirit of Christ 
is the Spirit of life and liberty and hope. It triumphs 
over fear and suffering ; it dares to hope and believe that 
the pain and groaning of the present world shall yet give 
place to the harmonies of a heavenly order. To be in 
Christ is to rest secure and unshaken in the sense of God’s 


love. He who is in Christ is persuaded that no expe- 


rience and no power shall be able to separate him from the 


love of God, which is in Christ Jesus his Lord (Rom. 
viii. 39). 


The later epistles of Paul also are full of this idea of 
the believer’s life in Christ and its implications. In 


_ Ephesians the readers are said to have been raised from 


the moral death of sin to the life of righteousness. This 
is what it means to be saved by grace through faith. 
The once spiritually dead now live in Christ ; the aliens 
from the favor and fellowship of God have been gathered 


into his family. The barriers between Jew and Gentile 
|| have been broken down, the alienations created by race 


prejudice and race hatred overcome. To be in Christ is 


| to have a sense of human brotherhood — to recognize our 


fellow-men of whatever race or nation as children of a 


| common Father. To be in Christ means to grow like him 
‘im personal character — to attain increasingly to the stat- 
ure of complete manhood which is illustrated in him. It 






















464 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


means to take each his place in the organism of society, 
each serving as a part, however humble, in making up the 
unity of the body, contributing his part to the building 
of the temple of Christian fellowship. Life in Christ is 
no isolated affair; it is no escape from the duties and 
responsibilities of life ; it is no mere solitary refuge from 
personal danger. It is life in the world, life which allies 
itself with others, and in mutual sympathy and support 
fronts the evils of the world with the superior might of 
a corporate morality. 

Life in Christ, the apostle goes on to say in effect, is a 
life of personal purity. It means to “ walk in love,” which 
ARO: exactly as in John, to “ walk in light” (Eph. y. 

2, 8), which, again, as in John, is a figurative designation 
x “goodness and righteousness and truth” (Eph. v. 9). 
Finally, a sketch is given of the reciprocal rights and 
duties of various classes of persons “in the Lord” ; 


servants. To be in Christ means to realize and to try 
fulfil one’s obligations in the various natural and social 
relations in which he is providentially placed. 
In Colossians we find a similar exposition of what being 
in Christ involves. He who has been raised from the 
moral death of sin with him must enter the world of 
heavenly truth and reality to which he belongs. He should 
centre his interest on things spiritual and divine, hiding 
his life with Christ in God (Col. iii. 3). To be in Christ 
means to live in Christ’s world, to ascend into the heights 
of his exaltation above the fleeting, changing things of 
earth and make one’s home in the abiding and eternal. 
But this ascent into heaven does not withdraw one from 
earth. The apostle does not mean to recommend any 
transcendental other-worldliness ; he proceeds immediately 
to describe the concrete errors and sins which the Christian 
must fight and conquer, and the plain moral duties which 
belong to the very substance of the Christian life: com- 
passion, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering, for- 
bearance, forgiveness, and, to crown and complete @ 
love, the all-inclusive virtue. 


SALVATION BY UNION WITH CHRIST 465 


If we turn to the Johannine writings, we shall find 
the same sort of mysticism, in which union with Christ 
means neither an ecstatic rapture nor a metaphysical 
absorption, but a moral kinship of life, an imitatio Christi, 
not merely in outward action, but in motive, spirit, and 
character. The dominant note which is struck in the First 
Epistle is this, that the Christian man must walk in the 
light, and “light” is explained to mean love. He must be 
frank, open, honest; honest, first of all, with himself in 
acknowledging his faults—then abjuring all bitterness and 
hatred, loving his fellow-men sincerely. Now love is only 
another name for holiness ; it is pure as the white light by 
__ which it is symbolized. The vision of Christ is a vision 
of holiness. He who believes on him and hopes in him 
_ is absolutely committed by that very fact to a righteous 
life. Every one that has his hope fixed on Christ purifies 
himself even as he is pure (1 Jn. iii. 8). And this right- 

eousness which union with Christ imples and demands is 
as plain and practical as it is lofty and ideal. It means 
love and service to men, careful discrimination between 
the evil and the good, cessation from sins of deed and 
disposition, victory over the world. In a word, it means 
to know God, that is, to live in obedience to him and in 
_fellowship with him, to realize the Godlike life, which és 
salvation. To this life Christ is the pathway. In his 
company, under his guidance, we enter uponit. In union 
with him we increasingly realize its meaning and its 
nature. To join one’s self to Christ is to enter upon the 
path of life ; it is to commit one’s self to his truths and 
ideals, to adopt as one’s own his motives and principles. 
To do this is the condition of salvation ; or, better, it is 
the beginning of salvation. Such a choice or self-commit- 
ment is the faith by which we are justified. “Can faith 
save him?” asks James. Yes; if it is that kind of faith 
—a faith which binds the soul to Christ in sincere preter- 
ence and aspiration for the life Christ bids men live. No; 
if by it is meant a passive acquiescence or intellectual 
assent, a notion, however correct, concerning the essence 
or policy of God. 








SS SSS 





































466 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


Can there be any question, then, why justification shoulé 
be conditioned upon faith —why salvation should be 
through union with Christ? Is any other condition rea- 
sonable or conceivable? And, yet, when we raise th 
question, why faith is reckoned for righteousness, theo- 
logians divide at once into rival and opposing parties. 
Bera faith 7s righteousness ; because it is the germ, or 
root, or beginning of righteousness ; because it is the 
divinely prescribed condition of obtaining it—such are 
some of the answers. Some will have it that faith is meri- 
torious ; others that it is only excellent, while still others 
seem to regard it as morally neutral. Here it is an act or 
choice of man’s own ; there it is an effect wrought in him 
by divine grace. For some righteousness is a status; for 
others a relation, and for yet others a character. Whata 
confusion of tongues and of theories, reminding one of Bush- 
nell’s catalogue of theological varieties — “the Supralap 
sarians and Sublapsarians; the Arminianizers and the true 
Calvinists ; the Pelagians and Augustinians ; the Tasters 
and the Exercisers ; Exercisers by divine efficiency and by 
human self-efficiency ; the love-to-being-in-general virtue, 
the willing-to-be-damned virtue, and the love-to-one’s-great- 
est-happiness virtue ; no ability, all ability, and moral and 
natural ability distinguished ; disciples by the new-creat- 
ing act of Omnipotence, and by change of the governing 
purpose ; atonement by punishment and by expression ; 
limited and general; by imputation and without impute 
tion.”! Who, then, can be saved? Which is the t 1e 
method? Which of the competing programs represents 
‘“God’s way with a soul”? Amidst the confusion it 
is a comfort to reflect that the divine grace is not 
conditioned upon the descriptions given in the theo- 
logical text-books of its invariable and necessary mode 
of operation. 

What is the ordo salutis in the prodigal’s return an 
restoration? Which is first —regret, remorse, confidence, 
or hope? I venture the very unconventional opinion that 


1 Christ in Theology, pp. V, Vi. 


SALVATION BY UNION WITH CHRIST 467 
























they were all mixed together. And why was the peni- 
tent son’s return and confession regarded as sufficient to 
warrant his cordial and complete reception by his father ? 
Certainly not because it made him at once a perfect boy, 
or even a perfect son. Not because his casting of him- 
self broken-hearted into his father’s arms was equivalent 
to the sum of all possible filial duty. Nevertheless the 
relation between that act and a possible perfect sonship was 
averyreal one. Call it the root, or germ, or beginning, or 
ie ection of the filial character; it makes little difference 
—they probably all mean the same. All the possibilities 
| ot his perfection as a son are implicit in that resolution 
and act of returning home. 

le Why, then, should faith be reckoned for righteousness ? 
4 it because there is a vital moral kinship or connection 
| between faith and righteousness, or in spite of the fact that 
there is none? I conceive the relation between them to 
p be the same as that between the son’s returning home, in 

“mingled remorse and hope, and his reception by ‘his father. 

Now what particular word one will use to describe the 
: ‘character of faith as thus viewed will depend largely upon 
his own definition of his word. Is faith meritorious, or 
| excellent? Is it a work, or only an acceptance? Is it the 
} condition or the appropriation of salvation? ‘The differ- 
\ ences which arise over such questions seem to me to have 
| their root in the difference between a legal and a moral 
| interpretation of justification. Some make the forensic 
| form of the conception determining for the whole doctrine 
| of salvation, while others have primary regard to the 
| moral and spiritual relations and experiences which are 
| involved i in the religious life. Our question recurs : What 
is there about faith which should warrant its acceptance 
for righteousness ? 

| Ideally considered, righteousness is Godlikeness. The 
| life of progressive and increasing Godlikeness is the right- 
eous life, not in perfection, but in process. The man Filo 
enters by faith on that way of righteousness is “ declared 
ghteous.” Is he so, or is he OK? Ideally righteous, 


u 


at is, morally perfect, he is not, but in desire, aspiration, 








































468 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTR NE 


and effort he has really begun the righteous life. Unie 
with Christ involves growing likeness to Christ, and Chris 
likeness is righteousness. Faith is the entrance upo 
right relations to God as revealed in Christ, and the fulfi 
ment of those relations is righteousness. The momel 
righteousness is ethically regarded, and not defined as. 
mere legal standing in court, the moment it is admitte 
that righteousness is a moral character, imperfect bi 
progressing, that moment faith ceases to be a mere for 
mal condition of salvation, without any inner connecti¢ 
with the righteous life, and becomes the step by whic 
that life is entered upon. We may put the same questi 
in other terms: What is the relation of repentance © 
forgiveness? If one insist upon regarding forgiveness 2 
a mere verdict, he may deny all vital connection betwee 
them; but if he conceives forgiveness as the constitutic 
of right personal relations, the founding of a fellowshi 
of life, then repentance is the inseparable moral countel 
part of such a restoration and harmony. 

To ask why our acceptance with God is conditione 
upon faith is like asking why that lost son needs to g 
home ; why, if one will have his father’s bounty and bles 
ing, he must take up an obedient and receptive attitut 
toward his father ; why a man’s accepting a gift is 
condition of his havingit. Is faith, then, a “ work "ta 
the sense of a legal quid pro quo by which God’s grace 
purchased, no ; in that case grace would be no more gra ce 
but in the sense of a moral achievement, a coming to one 
self, a victory of good desire and resolution, yes, for “th 
is the work of God, to believe on Jesus Christ whom ! 
has sent” (Jn. vi. 29). Real faith is a fact of profout 
moral significance and value, alike in its more active and i 
more passive aspects. If it is an acceptance, it is also 
aspiration; if it is a renunciation of merit, it is also 
least a dawning appreciation of goodness ; if it is a repo 
of soul in God, it is also a panting of the heart after Goe 
if it is confidence in his free and full forgiveness, it 
also a yearning for growth in his likeness. Faith is th 
the right attitude or disposition of man toward God. | 


SALVATION BY UNION WITH CHRIST 469 






xercising faith a man does what he ought to do, and who 
hall deny moral value to the doing of what one ought to 
lo? We are justified by faith, we are forgiven upon 
epentance, because we are saved by grace. All three 
statements mean the same. 


CHAPTER XII 


THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 






















WE seem to have emerged at length out of the arena ¢ 
theological strife into a region of comparative peace. Ti 
what extent this is really the case we shall see as we pro 
ceed. Certainly this much is true, that the Christiai 
world is fairly well agreed as to what are the principé 
qualities and duties of the Christian life. We recogni ; 
and appreciate them in whatever associations of opinio} 
or of worship they may be found. The Christian chai 
acter is fundamentally the same in Catholic and Protes 
tant, in Churchman and.Dissenter, in Sacramentalist am 
Quaker, in conservative and in radical. Love, sympathy 
humility, patience, and charitableness are coin which pa 
current everywhere ; while hatred and bitterness and a 
their kindred are admitted by all to be unchristian 
They are as unlovely and repulsive when seen in the li 
of the most orthodox believer as when disfiguring th 
character of the latitudinarian.. There is a degree 0 
agreement among Christians, which is sufficient for al 
practical purposes, as to what are the fruits of the Spirit 
on the one hand, and the works of the flesh, on the othet 

This, I take it, is the reason why Christians have § 
much in common in those acts and exercises whic 
have to do with the expression of religious aspirati¢ 
or the performance of practical Christian duties, ai 
so little in common in their theoretical explanations 
religion. All Christians can use the same Bible an 
find comfort and edification in its truths and promise 
but the instant any historical or theoretical question 
raised regarding it, they immediately go “wide as tl 
poles asunder.” The hymnody of the Christian ages, 1 

470 A 


THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 471 


1 which the devotions, aspirations and hopes of millions of 
‘believers have been expressed, is the common heritage of 
all Christendom. The many sects of Protestantism all 
sing, in great part, the same hymns. Any religiously 
minded person could enjoy the cadences of the Greek 
_ Church, which so charm the ear and inspire the heart as 
_ almost to make one forget the close alliance of this church 
with political despotism. He must be an extremely prej- 
-udiced Protestant whose heart is not touched by the 
solemn chants of the Roman Catholic ritual, even though 
they be parts of the mass, the theory of which he utterly 
- repudiates. 
I conelude that what unity there is among Christians is 
chiefly in the sphere of religious feeling and of practical 
life and duty. Outside that sphere reign difference and 
division. An evangelistic meeting for the conversion of 
Meinners is conducted in much the same method by those 
whose theology is Calvinistic as by those whose theories 
| are Arminian, and apparently sinners are saved in the 
same way in both cases. But question the leaders in such 
_moyements and you learn that there is no similarity what- 
ever. In one place they are saved by “a new creating act 
| of omnipotence,” in the other by ‘a change of the gov- 
erning purpose”; you are in the intricacies of the ordo 
| salutis. Yet the preaching is much alike in both places ; 
‘the prayers are similar, and the hymns are identical. Or, 
| let one enter a Christian church on occasion of the cus- 
| tomary Sunday service. They are celebrating the Lord’s 
supper. It is a simple and touching memorial of Christ’s 
| supreme self-sacrifice, and all that is said seems harmo- 
‘nious with this simplicity and suggestiveness ; but if one 
were to ask for some explanation concerning this rite, so 
eonely clear and self-explanatory, he might, not im- 
probably, hear the most recondite explanation of its 
mysterious powers and effects, or an elaborate exposition 
of the proper opinions and practices which alone entitle 
the disciple of Christ to participation in it. Its practical 
‘religious meaning and use seem plain enough; not so the 
theory. 



















5 










































472. CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE q 


One cannot help wondering what aspect the Chris i 
world would present to-day if the Church had kept to the 
policy and program of Jesus. What if the Church in he 
ideals and efforts had remained predominantly religious 
and ethical, instead of becoming, as she did, predominantly 
doctrinal and speculative? It is not easy, indeed, to 
make such a supposition real to ourselves. We are so 
accustomed to associate the great doctrinal disputes which 
have succeeded one another from age to age, with the his. 
tory and activity of the Church, that they almost seem 
an essential part of her life. But are they really such? 
Was the neo-platonic philosophy, which formed the chiet 
substratum of ecclesiastical orthodoxy, essential to Chris- 
tianity ? To take a specific example : Has the Augus 
tinian doctrine of original sin with all the disputes a 
universalia ante rem and universalia in re in which it wi 
involved, promoted the real purposes of the Christian 
religion? As we look back upon the extinet and, as i 
now often seems, well-nigh meaningless controversies of the 
past, it is not easy to resist the feeling that the Christia 
Church might have done a greater work and might noy 
present to the world a better representation of the Spiri 
of Christ if she had observed the terms of his commissic 
and had not undertaken to annex to her province 
many foreign territories, such as those of natural science 
archeology, and transcendental metaphysics. 

There, are, indeed, those who declare that Christianity 
a dogma rather than a life. They mean, I suppose, tha 
the Christian religion consists primarily in a system of doe 
trines on which the Christian life is dependent. There 1 
doubtless some room for differences in the interpretatior 
and application of such assertions. But what they woul 
seem to involve is the claim that such theories as ha} 
been current in the Church concerning the compositit 
of Christ’s person, the Trinity, original sin, expiatiol 
and the like —or, some particular selection of these the 
ories —represent the primary purpose of Christ and ¢ 
the Christian religion in the world. This has certainl 
been the working theory, if not the avowed opinion, ¢ 


THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 473 


multitudes of men, particularly of theologians. I would 
raise the question whether one could derive this impres- 
sion of the main purpose of Christ and of the mean- 
ing of his Kingdom from his own words. Let the 
advocate of the primacy of dogmas select any assortment 
of them which seem to him truest and most impor- 
tant. Let him take, for example, unconditional predesti- 
nation, tripersonal Trinity, the hypostatic union of the 
eternally begotten Logos with impersonal human nature, 
native depravity, antecedent imputation, and penal substi- 
tution. That isa fairly representative collection of widely 
accepted orthodox dogmas. Now if Christianity consists 
primarily in dogmas, it must consist in some particular 
dogmas. It cannot consist equally in each of two contra- 
dictory dogmas. It cannot, for example, consist equally 
in the dogma that Christ’s human nature was personal and 
in the dogma that it was impersonal; nor, again, can it con- 
sist equally in the dogma that we are under the wrath of 
_ God from birth because we really sinned in Adam (Augus- 
 tinian realism), and the dogma that though we did not sin 
in Adam at all, we are by virtue of God’s sovereignty 
regarded as if we had, and are condemned accordingly 
_Cfederal imputation). But let my proposed collection, 
or any other similar assortment of dogmas, be taken as 
representative. Then let them be compared with the 
teaching, and life, and life-work of Jesus, and in the light 
of that comparison the reader shall judge whether they 
fairly represent the primary purpose of Christ’s mission 
and Kingdom. I do not care to argue the question, but I 
_ should like to urge that it be fairly considered. 

But even those for whom Christianity consists primarily 
in dogmas do not deny that it is, secondarily, a life; even 
for them it is concerned incidentally with character. Let 
__ us note one or two classic examples of this correlation and 
_ comparative estimate of dogma and life. ‘“ Whosoever 
_ will be saved,” declares the Athanasian creed, “ must thus 
i think of the Trinity,” and this “thus” is explained to 
/ mean the belief in the eternal coequality of three persons 
_ in one God, the second of whom is begotten by an eternal 






474 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE | 
























process from the first, and the third of whom eternally 
proceeds from the other two—and yet this creed does no 
omit to add, quite incidentally, that men must give an 
account of their works and be judged accordingly. The 
primacy of dogma is made evident; more than forty 
paragraphs are devoted to the dogmas belief in which is 
declared to be essential to salvation; but two sections at the 
end are reserved for laying emphasis on a good life, so tha 
this is not excluded from the definition of “the Catholie 
Faith.” Jesus and the apostles also spoke frequently of 
what men must do to be saved, but I can detect no resem- 
blance between what they said and the propositions con- 
tained in these forty-one paragraphs. 

One may test the question in hand for himself in vari- 
ous ways. The late Dr. Edwin Hatch brings it sharply 
before us in the opening paragraph of his Hibbert Lectures 
on the Influence of Greek Philosophy upon Christian The- 
ology. ‘It is impossible for any one,” he says, “ whether 
he be a student of history or no, to fail to notice a differ- 
ence of both form and content between the Sermon on the 
Mount and the Nicene Creed. The Sermon on the Moun 
is the promulgation of a new law of conduct ; it assumes 
beliefs rather than formulates them ; the theological con- 
ceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather than 
the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly 
absent. The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of his- 
torical facts and partly of dogmatic inferences ; the meta- 
physical terms which it contains would probably have 
been unintelligible to the first disciples ; ethics have no 
place init. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peas 
ants, the other to a world of Greek philosophers.” 1 The 
absence of ethics from one of the great ecumenical creeds 
of Christendom, and the metaphysical conditions of salva- 
tion prescribed in another, represent one estimate —still 
widely current —of the relative value of dogma and o 
character in the Christian world. But to my mind thi 
estimate only shows how completely the gospel of Jesv 


1 The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christi 
Church, p. 1. 


THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 4T5 


became transformed into an esoteric doctrine as remote 

















from the motives and purposes of Jesus’ life-work as the 
unseemly strifes and alienations which it engendered 
were unproductive of the fruits of his Spirit in mankind. 
Jesus was wholly concerned with ethics, with begetting 
and fostering in men the Godlike life. The word “ char- 
acter”? summarizes the great interest and life-purpose of 
Jesus Christ. 

Inasmuch, then, as Jesus attached supreme importance 
to the Christian character, — since for him the realization 
of the Godlike life zs salvation, — let us proceed to inquire 
what it includes and by what means it is attained. We 
observe, first of all, that Jesus had no set formula for 
defining the character required in his disciples; he 
employed a variety of terms to set it forth and illustrate 
it. Definitions are almost inevitably narrowing and exclu- 
sive. If, however, any three words were to be selected 
from the tradition of the Lord’s sayings as expressing his 
conception of the Christian character, they should probably 
be the words, “righteousness,” “love,” and “eternal life.” 
The Sermon on the Mount is a typical description of the 
true righteousness which must characterize the members 
of the Kingdom —the righteousness which surpasses the 
legal formalism and ceremonial punctiliousness which the 
scribes and Pharisees called righteousness. Meekness, 
mercifulness, aspiration after goodness, purity, peacemak- 
ing, humility, patience, charity —these are the constitu- 
ents of the Christian character as Jesus there portrays it. 

But if “ righteousness ” is one note in this collection of 
logia, “love” isan equally prominent note. Love all men, 
even your enemies; suffer injury rather than do injury; 
do good even to the evil and unthankful ; be generous and 
complete in love as your Father in heaven is—these are 
the supreme requirements of Christ; these are the quali- 
ties and dispositions which constitute men sons of God 
and members of his Kingdom. And how evident it is 
| that righteousness and love mean the same thing — that 
the love which Jesus enjoins 7s righteousness. Your 
righteousness, says Jesus, must exceed that of the scribes, 





































476 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


and then he proceeds to illustrate the nature and contents 
of this superior righteousness by saying: abjure revenge, 
maintain purity in thought, speak the truth in simplicity 
and frankness, stand ready to bless and serve all men— 
in short, exercise a love like that of God in its largeness 
and fulness —that is the true righteousness. How eyi- 
dent it is that we have here an elaboration of the prophetic 
conception of righteousness as practically synonymous 
with love. Micah summarizes God’s supreme require- 
ment of men in words which sound the key-note of our 
Lord’s teaching in this Sermon: “to do justly, to love 
mercy, and to walk humbly with God” (Micah vi. 8). 

We are thus brought face to face once more with the 
contrast between the biblical conception of righteousness 
and that which has been most widely current in tradi- 
tional theology. Take, for example, this definition of 
the righteousness of God: It is “not benevolence or a 
form of benevolence, but a distinct and separate attri 
bute of the divine nature which demands that sin shoule 
be visited with punishment.”! God’s righteousness, it 
this view, be it observed, has no kinship with beneyo- 
lence or grace, but is “ distinct and separate ” from these 
qualities. Place beside this a priori definition some of 
the most characteristic biblical descriptions of the dt 
vine righteousness : “A righteous God, and a Saviour 
(Is. xlv. 21); “Thy righteousness is like the mountains 
of God; thy judgments are a great deep ; thou savest 
man and beast” (Ps. xxxvi. 6); “ Deliver me, O God 
of my salvation, and my tongue shall sing of thy right 
eousness” (Ps. li. 14); “Answer me in thy righteous 
ness, and enter not into judgment with thy servant 
(Ps. exliii. 1, De“ Dany the Lord which exercise lov- 
ingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth” 
(Jer. ix. 24); “I (Yahweh) that speak in righteous- 
ness, mighty to save” (Is. Ixiii. 1); “God is faithful and 
righteous to forgive us our sins” (1 Jn. i. 9). When 
then, God “does justly and loves mercy ” does he exer: 
cise two wholly “ distinct and separate ” functions ? Wher 


1 Strong, Systematic Theology, p. 417. 














THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER ATT 


_he “practises lovingkindness and righteousness” does 
he perform two acts which are quite unrelated to each 
other? When he shows himself “a righteous God and 
a Saviour ” does he exhibit two “distinct and separate ” 
characters? When the prophet describes Yahweh as 
speaking in righteousness, mighty to save, is it as if he 
said: I who proclaim my fixed and necessary determi- 
nation to punish all sin, yet in my distinct and separate 
attribute of mercy (optional as respects its exercise) 
have decided to save? When God is declared to be 
“righteous to forgive,” is his disposition denoted by 
“righteous” wholly independent of the benevolent act 
of forgiving and entirely “distinct and separate” from 
it? I think I may safely assume that such questions 
answer themselves. 

But we are dealing with the Christian character. 
That is defined by our Lord to consist in sonship to God, 
that is, in moral likeness to him. Now let us apply 
the maxim of the author just cited, that the supreme 
excellence in God and man must be the same. This 
supreme excellence is, then, retaliatory justice. The 
exercise of mercy is optional with God; it must there- 
fore be optional with us, and we are expressly told that 
it is so: “As we may be kind, but must be righteous, 
so God in whose image we are made, may be merciful, 
but must be holy.” ! Now place beside this conception 
of God and of man—with both of whom it is said to be 
optional whether they shall be kind and merciful or not 
—the teaching of Jesus under review that the merciful 
alone can obtain mercy at God’s hands, and that the 
ideal of human perfection consists in a benevolence like 
that of God which bestows its benefits on all mankind. 
Did not Jesus Christ regard unmercifulness as a sin? 
| Did he not speak of it in sternest condemnation? How, 
|| then, is the exercise of it among men a matter of choice 
or preference? Or, to put the matter in a form in 
which it may be clearly seen and judged, place side by 
side Dr. Strong’s assertion that God and man are alike 


1§trong, Philosophy and Religion, p. 196. 








































478 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE | 


free to exercise mercy or to refuse to exercise it, and 
the repeated citation by our Lord of the prophetic wo d 
that God’s primary demand is mercy (Mt. ix. 13; xii. 
7, cf. Hos. vi. 6), or such a saying as: “Love your 
enemies, and do good, and ye shall be sons of the High- 
est; for he is kind toward the unthankful and evil. 
Be ye merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (Lk. vi 
35, 36). I cannot answer for others, but upon my own 
mind the impression made by this language is distinetly 
different from that which would be conveyed by saying: 
You may or may not be merciful as you prefer, for with 
your Father the exercise of mercy is optional. 

The various qualities and activities of the Christian 
character on which Jesus lays most stress are all con 
gruous with what we have found in the mountain Ser- 
mon. The true righteousness which makes men sons 
of God consists in a love like that of God himself. Ac- 
cordingly, we find strong and frequent emphasis laid upon 
the requirement to forgive as God forgives. It is his 
nature and disposition to forgive those who repent and 
forsake their sins, and the law of Godlikeness requires 
that we, like him, should forego revenge and stand ready 
not only to forgive but to bless and serve those who haye 
injured us (Mt. vi. 14,15). The unmerciful servant who 
would not imitate his master in forgiving love put him 
self outside the pale of mercy by refusing to submit his 
own life to its law (Mt. xviii. 21 sg.). Forgiveness is @ 
duty because forgiveness is Godlike. And yet theology 
has prevailingly conceived of God as indisposed or unab e 
to forgive, or, at best, as only desiring to be willing to do so 
The characteristic note in the orthodox doctrine of God 
is that with him forgiveness even of repentant sinners 18 
extremely difficult and has to be provided for by elaborate 
plans and great pains; that it is hindered by giganti¢ 
obstacles which must first be cleared away; the charac 
teristic note of Jesus’ teaching is that God’s forgiveness 
ever waits to descend upon men so soon as they will fulfil 
the conditions of receiving it. The burden of theology 
is: How can God overcome the hindrances in his natur 


THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 479 






to the forgiveness of the penitent — how can his supposed 
_ desire to be willing become real and effective willingness ? 
"The burden of Jesus’ teaching is: How can men be 
made to desire a Godlike life — how can they be induced 
to accept in repentance and humility a forgiveness which 
God i is eager to bestow, and to exercise toward other men 
“a similar Godlike readiness to forgive and bless ? 

The Christian character, then, as Jesus conceived it, is 
summed up in the one word “ Godlikeness.”” Become the 
‘sons of your Father; be like your Father in love, in 
| _ purity, in readiness to serve and forgive, and you thereby 
| become members of the Kingdom of heaven ; to acquire 
‘such a character — to live such a life—is salvation. But 
| how are men to know what God’s nature and require- 
ments are so that they can understand, desire, and choose 
' them as prescribing the law of their own life? The life 
and character of Christ himself are the answer. The more 
i abstract demand to be like God is translated into the 
‘concrete and unmistakable requirement that the disciple 
should be as his Master. It is, indeed, the unparalleled 
marvel of the character of Jesus Christ that we can trans- 
| fer the qualities of that character, point by point, to God 
himself with a perfect sense of congruity and truth. If 
| Jesus seems to set before us a high and abstract law for 
) life, he does not leave us Tahout a clear and definite 
Interpretation of it. If he points us to a distant and 









way to an ever closer approximation to it. The wa Christi 
| is the way to the Father. 

| But it is obvious that no mere outward imitation of 
| Christ would fulfil the requirement in question. The 
Specific acts of Jesus, in their external aspects, were as 
| different from those likely to be required of us as ancient 
| oriental life was different from modern western civiliza- 
tion. The effort to reproduce the precise form of Jesus’ 
life and actions, to do in par ticular circumstances as it is 
‘believed Jesus would do in those circumstances, is quite 
I) Bicly to involve and proceed upon what Paul calls a knowl- 
of Christ after the flesh. We follow Christ only 


if 


apparently unattainable goal, he proves himself to be the * 



















480 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 4 


afar off unless we enter into the meaning of the inner li 
of Jesus. To possess ourselves of the great motives ant 
convictions which animated him — to enter into the reali 
zation of his view of life, his estimate of the world, hi 
certitude of God — that is to follow Christ. The fellow 
ship of his inner life is sonship to God. The Christian 
character is the Christlike spirit. 

But even such statements may appear too formal. We 
must still ask: Just what, specifically, does participatio: 
in the spirit of Christ include? What was the most char 
acteristic peculiarity in the life and life-work of Jesus’ 
I believe that the teaching of Jesus himself and the wit 
ness of the New Testament as a whole are to the sam 
effect, namely: The central thing in the life of Christ i 
symbolized by the cross. He came to minister and te 
give his life; he laid down his life for his friends; in hi 
witness-bearing to the truth of what God is and woul 
help men to be, he consecrated himself to labor and suf 
fering; knowing that he came forth from God, he girdec 
himself for the service of men; he must needs suffer i 
order to enter upon the glorious triumphs of self-denying 
love; he will bear the griefs and sicknesses and sims ¢ 
men in order that he may bear them away. 

“ But all this,” we shall be told, “he was doing officia 
on our behalf; there is surely no sense in which we 
enter into and share these great acts and experiences.” Bu 
I am constrained to think that Jesus himself and Paul ane 
John thought otherwise. Our Lord did not speak of 
experiences symbolized by his cross in terms of an officia 
work done “ outside of us.” Take up your cross, he say 
to his disciples, and come after me. Do as I have dor 
to you. He who would save his life must give it: lil 
the grain of wheat, he must die in order to live. 
must be crucified with Christ, exclaims Paul. As i 
laid down his life for us, declares John, so must we lay 
down our lives for the brethren. Christ’s life, it appea 
was a representative life of self-giving, and it was so 
because it had its roots in the life of God, the gre 
Giver. Here is the heart of the gospel: Every man wi 


THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 481 























will enter into life must take up Christ’s cross and make 
it his own cross; he must die daily to the life of selfish- 
‘ness and sin, he must give himself in self-denying, serving 
love ; he must bow his heart to the universal, eternal law 
of sacrifice which reigned supreme in the life and labor 
and death of Jesus because he came forth from God and 
eflected the life of God in humanity. Yes, the cross is 
he emblem of the Christian character because it symbol- 
| izes what is deepest and most characteristic in Christ, 
and it symbolizes what is deepest in Christ because it 


eternal sympathy and self-giving which, in turn, eral 
_ the immeasurable sorrow of God over sin. 

| In one of the visions of the Apocalypse the seer is bid- 
* den to look and behold the victorious Lion of the tribe of 
_ Judah, the all-conquering Messiah. But when he looked, 
_ he saw, not a Lion, but a Lamb, “standing in the midst of 
_ God’s throne, as though it had been slain” (Rev. v. 6), 
| suggesting that at the heart of God’s sovereignty is suf- 


, 


fering love. And it is because the eternal will of God is 
_ a will of love that Christ, who came to realize the Father’s 
| will, saw the meaning of his own life in self-giving. It 
_ was at once the Father's commandment and his own choice 
| that he should give his life in absolute self-devotion ; the 
‘command and the choice were not two, but one, for his 
| consciousness (Jn. x. 18). And since this giving of life 
was Christ’s law, it becomes the law of all Christlike liy- 
ng. This is what the Christian character truly means, 
and I cannot but think that all other meanings, commonly 
fs associated with it, are superficial and trifling in compari- 
son. The cross, I repeat, is the symbol of the Christian . 
[ character because it speaks the meaning of Christ, and it 
| epresents what is most characteristic in Christ because it 
| expresses what is deepest in the heart of God. 
_ What, now, are the sources or producing causes of the 
| Christian character? Is it effected by forces outside of and 
foreign to us, or is it the development within us of capaci- 


ties that are native to us? The former is the prevailing 
_ theological representation. The “natural man” has been 


{ 
{ 

































482 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


commonly described as utterly dead to all that was divine 
and good ; the moral death in trespasses and sins to whicl 
the New Testament refers has been taken in the most 
absolute and universal sense ; man, it is said, is as irre 
sponsive to the influences of the divine Spirit and of the 
higher life as a corpse is irresponsive to the touch. Such 
assertions are corollaries of the doctrine of total depravity 
If, as that doctrine maintains, all the faculties of man are 
“only inlets and outlets of sin, channels of corruption” 
if there is in man by nature “nothing but sin, no good 
at all” (Edwards), then, of course, there is nothing 
man out of which to develop or on which to build the 
Christian character; it must be conceived, it would seem, 
as produced wholly ad eatra —as imported into man or as 
constituted by an entire remaking of man. To this length 
the figures of moral death and new birth have not infre- 
quently been carried out in theology, as they often are, of 
course, in popular religious teaching. 

Such representations give rise to many questions 
among them these: Can they be squared with the assump- 
tions and contents of Jesus’ teaching? Are they psycho. 
logically tenable, or are they examples of the common 
bondage of theology to figures of speech? Did not our 
Lord recognize in men some capacity for goodness, how 
ever undeveloped — some desires and aspirations to whieh 
his gospel of faith and love could appeal? Did his teach 
ing concerning the slavery of men to sinful thought and 
habit go the length of maintaining that there is in men 
by nature nothing but sin, no good at all? On the con- 
trary, Jesus appealed to men in the conviction that they 
were not without capacity to respond to his message, and 
he often won responses from the most unpromising. There 
were those who were steeped in prejudice, —the morally 
blind and deaf,—but even these he did not regard as hope- 
lessly lost and irrecoverable. In the worst of men he 
found a spark of goodness. He saw in the plain common _ 
people, misguided as they were, the promise of a rich 
spiritual harvest, if only suitable laborers could be had to 
reap it. That men were by nature susceptible to moral 


THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 483 









fluences and incentives to goodness, despite all their wil- 
ful blindness and depravity, was the unswerving convic- 
tion of Jesus and the presupposition of all his work. 

Tt is hardly necessary to point out that many of the 
‘common popular representations of the new birth are tanta- 
mount to saying that the natural man is not a moral being 
at all, but is only made so by a new creating act of om- 
nipotence. ‘To suppose, however, that a new rational and 
moral constitution is given in regeneration, is to confound 
a moral with a metaphysical change and to antagonize the 
primal certainty of personal identity. The overworking 
of such figures of speech as have been mentioned has often 
Ted to a conception of “ moral inability,” which is incon- 
sistent with the most self-evident facts of human nature 
— facts which alone make possible a religious life for man 
‘on any terms or by any means. Christ and the apostles 
| appealed to sinful men to repent and turn to God in re- 
‘sponse to their warnings and assurances of forgiveness. 
et conversion is popularly represented as something 
wrought upon man. For this misapprehension there is 
some excuse in the fact that in our common English ver- 
sion the appeal to turn to God is uniformly mistranslated 
“be converted.” In every case, however, the verb so ren- 
dered is active in force—turn or turn yourselves to God 
in repentance and trust.1_ The Revised Version has cor- 
rected these renderings. In the New Testament conver- 
sion is always represented as man’s act — an act of which 
he is capable under the appeal and influence of the truth. 
t might have been a check upon the more extreme popu- 
lar forms of the doctrine of man’s’natural inability if it had 
= 2 #.g.. Mk. iv. 12=Mt. xiii. 15=ZJn. xii. 40 = Acts xxviii. 27: A. V., 
"be converted,” R.V., ‘‘turn again” (Gr. émicrpéwowr) ; Mt. xviii. 3: 
A. V., ‘‘Except ye be converted, and become as little children,’’ etc., 
R. V., ‘‘ Except ye turn,”’ etc. (Gr. dav uh orpadFre), a passive form used 
in a middle or reflexive sense, as elsewhere in N. T. (vid. Thayer’s Lexi- 


con); Lk. xxii. 32: A. V., ‘‘when thou art converted,’ R. V., ‘‘ when 
once thou hast turned again’ (Gr. éricrpévas) ; Acts iii. 19: A. V., ‘* Re- 




















































preaching of the gospel sinners were called upon to tu 
to God, assumes that the gospel message was not wholl 
alien to them, but was adapted to quicken and call forth 
in them a native religious capacity which belongs to man 
as such. 

The human soul is, as Tertullian said, “naturally 
Christian,” that is, adapted by nature to religion. 
Christian life is the flowering and fulfilment of man’s ne 
tive capacities and possibilities as the offspring and image 
of God. The Christian character is not foreign, but ger- 
mane, to human nature. In the religious life man finds 
and realizes himself. He is meant for his Father’s house 
and his Father’s fellowship. When he lives in the far 
country of selfishness and sin, he is forfeiting his birth- 
right and losing himself. He comes to himself only as he 
comes back to his Father. Man is by nature a child of 
God, even if he be a lost and wandering and sinful child. 
He is in his true possibilities and destination a son of God, 
even if by reason of an unfilial life he has belied the name 
and feels that he is “*no more worthy to be called a son.” 
Into the disputed exegetical questions regarding the 
fatherhood of God and the sonship of man to God in the 
teaching of Jesus, we cannot nowenter.! Suffice it to say 
that, beyond all question, our Lord regarded man as by na- 
ture kindred to God from whom he came, and therefore con- 
stitutionally religious. Whether he called all men sons — 
of God or called only those so who were striving to realize 
the true idea of sonship in obedience and likeness to God. 
in no essential way affects the truth of our main conten- 
tion. If, as I think, only the latter class are so deseribe 
in Jesus’ teaching, it is no less true that the evil and un- 
thankful are in their capacities, possibilities, and true des 
tination sons of God. If the wayward prodigal is not 


1These topics are discussed in my Theology of the New Testament, — 
Pt. I. ch. vi. 


f THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 485 
_ worthy to bear the name of son in its true meaning, he is 
i no less, in a real sense, a son ; he still has the capacity to 
_ resume right relations to his father. He is a self-banished 
son who has, for the time, disinherited himself, but the 
_ Father has not ceased, on that account, to be all that he 
_ ever was in willingness to bless, in love, and in compas- 
sion. Father and son are kindred, despite the separation 
and alienation. Sin does not annul God’s fatherhood, 
though it sunders the relations of fellowship. The nat- 
ural bond of essential kinship remains as the guaranty 
that the true filial life is still possible and may be entered 
upon by repentance and conversion and increasingly real- 
ized by continued fidelity and obedience. 
- The human influences which operate in the production 
of the Christian character are many and various. Some 
of them are so mysterious and subtle that we can but 
dimly trace and partially describe them. Such, for ex- 
_ ample, is the force of heredity. That the native disposi- 
_ tion, the type of mind, which is bequeathed by ancestors 
to their descendants has much to do with the development 
of their religious character is an unquestionable fact. 
Theology has made much of the influence of heredity 
upon the moral life in the propagation of sin, but has 
never developed any corresponding doctrine of its effect 
in the promotion of virtue. But it is evident that in 
| whatever sense sin is promoted by those mysterious forces 
| which we sum up in the term “ heredity,” the same law holds 
good for the propagation of righteousness by the same 
means. If there is any fact corresponding to the words 
“hereditary sin,” there is an equally important fact corre- 
sponding to the words “hereditary goodness.” It is rank 
_ pessimism to say that the laws of nature work for man’s 
moral degradation and not also for his betterment. ‘ Grace 
travels by the same conveyance as sin,” Dr. Bushnell 
used to say. 

Then there is the world of personal relations and influ- 
ences in the midst of which we live. Into this complex 
of forces which operate upon every life enter so many 
factors that we are quite powerless to separate and de- 





486 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE _ 






















scribe them. Parental influence, early training, Christian 
teaching, the moral and religious atmosphere, our own 
meditations and aspirations, the voice of conscience, the 
conviction of sin, which were impossible without some 
sense, however indistinct, of a perfection which is our 
true ideal and goal — these are the names of some of the 
forces which quicken our religious natures and help to 
build the Christian character. It is one of the happy 
signs of the times that these forces or influences are now 
being subjected to close, sympathetic psychological study. 
Bushnell’s Christian Nurture was a pioneering effort in 
this direction which has been followed up by the work 
of various philosophical experts.1_ Thus at length the old 
a priort ordo salutis, framed on the assumption that its 
exponents were located at the divine centre and were 
contemplating the operation of the grace of God from 
above downward, is likely to give place to a more real 
and natural conception of the religious life and character 
consonant with the constitution of man and constructed 
in accordance with his experience. 

But among all the powers and influences which we can 
perceive and make real and definite to ourselves those are 
the greatest which are distinctly associated with the name 
of Christ. As our life unfolds, the Bible and the Churehk 
and all the institutions and agencies of religion mean to 
us what Christ means to us. In him we find, more and 
more, the interpretation of the real nature and meaning 
of the religious life. In the unclouded mirror of his cer 
titude and consciousness of God we see ourselves reflected 
—in the real moral poverty of our life, but also in the 
possible enrichment of it through union with him. Tradi 
tional theology has, indeed, accorded to the moral influence 
of Jesus only a secondary importance. The reason is 
apparent. This theology is reared upon a philosophical 
dualism. God and the world are disparate; the world is 


1 Among treatises of this character those best known to me are: 
E. D. Starbuck’s The Psychology of Religion (1899) ; Frank Granger's 
The Soul of a Christian (1900), and G. A. Coe’s The Spiritual Life 
(1900) and The Religion of a Mature Mind (1902). 

















THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 487 


an undivine, evil sphere. In like manner, man is differ- 
-entiated as far as possible from God; he is utterly sinful 
and hostile to Godt Edwards expressed the traditional 
doctrine of human nature by saying that man was natu- 
‘rally so great an enemy to God that he would, if he could, 
‘hurl the Almighty from his throne. As a divine person, 
Christ is regarded as being at an infinite remove from us. 
He is not near enough to us to make his personal influence 
_an appreciable practical force. His value is that he “ trans- 
‘acts with God” (Dr. Orr) on our behalf. We must 
‘Mount in thought into the world where the eternal per- 
‘sons of the Trinity take counsel together and the claims 
of rival attributes are adjusted, in order to discover his 
| Significance for the religious character. 

_ But what if God and man are not essentially disparate 
and mutually hostile? Whatif the world and the natural 
life of man are not neutral spheres, bereft of God’s pres- 
‘ence and alien to his Spirit? What if Christ is not to be 
brought down from the heavens above or brought up from 
‘the abyss beneath, but is very near us? What if his 
divineness consists in his nearness to us — that is, in his 
perfect realization of the true, divine ideal of human na- 
)ture? On any view of God’s relation to the world which 
| even a philosophic theism (to say nothing of a vital theol- 
ogy) would sanction to-day, the influence of Jesus Christ, 

as the incarnation of the immanent God in our humanity, 
is the most potent and practical power which ever does or 
ever can touch our life. For myself I believe that we 
have scarcely begun to appreciate the significance and say- 
‘ing power of such a personality and such a life as that of 
Jesus Christ in our world, and that no theology which 





















r 1 Not long since I heard one of the most thoughtful and widely ex- 
Perienced missionaries on the foreign field — Rev. Robert A. Hume, D. D. 
—say (in substance) this: “One of the deepest differences between 
heathenism and Christianity consists in their respective views of the 
relations of God and man. Heathen religions put God and man as far 
part as possible; Christianity brings them as close together as possible. 
in heathenism God and man are alien; in Christianity they are kin- 
dred.’ If this is so, the question is pertinent : Is the traditional theology 
‘Christian ? 


488 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


was not practically deistic and dualistic could ever remar 
it to any secondary place. Of course if all men are b 
nature moral corpses, there need be no talk of person 
example and influence; in that case, men must first | 
created moral beings by some celestial dynamics. Wors 
still, if men are naturally so hostile to God that (as Ee 
wards said), they would, if possible, blot God out of bein 
then the notion of drawing out their religious capaciti 
in a natural and normal development under instructie 
and guidance is out of the question. They must be con 
quered and subjugated by a superior alien power. B 
what if these are not so much Christian as heathen con 
ceptions ? 

Methinks I see the reader at this point arming himse 
with texts: ‘“ What about the ‘ natural man’ who is * 
subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be’? Doe 
not John say that ‘the whole world lieth in the evil one’ 
Are not all men, according to Paul, ‘by nature childre 
of wrath’?” I reply: Paul’s natural or psychic mani 
the contrast to the spiritually minded man. The on 
description, as little as the other, refers to what men ai 
by nature and from birth. The apostle is dealing will 
the contrast of two developed moral characters. So, toe 
the Johannine contrast of light and darkness, of evil a 
good, is a moral, not a metaphysical, contrast. The worl 
is, indeed, evil enough, but that is because it has chose 
darkness rather than light, not because it is by natut 
alien to God and demoniacal. With the passage abou 
“children of wrath” I have dealt elsewhere (p. 314). Bu 
if John had adopted, instead of opposing, Gnostic dualism 
if Paul had been saturated, instead of tinged, with lat 
Jewish deism, that would not alter the fact that Jes 
conceived of man as kindred to God and of himself as th 
interpreter of God to man and of man to himself, « 
taught that under his influence and inspiration men wer 
to rise into fellowship with God and to realize the life of 
sonship, that is, of moral likeness to God. 

But I foresee another objection which I can well belie 
has been gathering force in the reader’s mind as he ha 













































tS oom 


THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 489 


proceeded through this chapter: Is the Christian char- 
acter, then, a mere human development —the mere un- 
folding of latent capacities in us? What place is left 
for the grace of God, for the work of the divine Spirit ? 
What of regeneration and sanctification? Is the Chris- 


tian life all a matter of man’s unaided power? Are we to 


end in sheer naturalism ? 


In reply I would say, first of all, that I do not admit 


that there is any such thing as man’s unaided power. I 
| hold that man lives and has his being in vital relation 


with God, and that religion is the realization and perfect- 
ing of that relation. Religion is not, therefore, something 


_ special and unnatural — something superimposed upon the 
natural life of man. It is the fulfilment of man’s nature 


as a son of God — the progressive attainment of his divine 


‘ideal. The irreligious life is a deflection from that ideal 


—a forfeiture of man’s inheritance from God. It is the 
sinful and irreligious life which is unnatural and the reli- 


gious life which is natural, that is, consonant with man’s 


nature. To suppose that the nature of man is essentially 
irreligious, and that religion is a foreign addition to his 


| life, is possible only on the assumptions of a dualistic 
/ and pessimistic philosophy. I would raise the question, 


whether such objections as have been specified above do 


not really arise, however unconsciously, from just such a 
philosophy.? 


My answer, then, to these objections would be this: 


The Christian character is not a mere human development, 
) an unfolding of human capacities in separateness from 


1 Archdeacon Wilson says of the type of theology to which I here 


|) allude, that it is ‘‘ essentially dualistic and tends to dualism and division 


everywhere. It sharply distinguishes,’’ he continues, ‘‘ the natural from 
the supernatural, the material from the spiritual, the sacred from the 
profane, the human from the divine. It leads on to distinctions of con- 
verted from unconverted, laity from clergy, inspired from uninspired, 


|| Church from world. It creates a passion for distinctions. It separates 


the Father from the Son; God’s justice from his mercy ; the gift from 


| the gifts of the Holy Spirit. It defines everything, and definition almost 
|| Mecessitates the materialization of our thoughts ; it defines the stages of 
‘salvation, the modes and conditions of transmission of the divine life 
|| through the sacraments,” etc. The Gospel of the Atonement, pp. 144, 146. 





















490 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


God, for the reason that there is, and can be, no sue 
separateness. The conception of a mere human develoy 
ment, on the one hand, and of the operation of the diyin 
Spirit, on the other, rests upon a false contrast. Eve 
philosophical theism has transcended it in its doctrine ¢ 
the immanent God. Where, then, is the place for tl 
action of God in the religious life? I answer: Every 
where. There is no range or sphere of the true, norm: 
life of man from which God’s Spirit of grace is evé 
absent. To the objection that I would make the Chris 
_ tian character wholly natural, I reply that I would mak 
it wholly supernatural. In other words, I repudiate th 
philosophical dualism which is implied in the contra 
commonly made between the natural and the supernatura 
The contrast is as false and as pernicious as the popula 
distinction between sacred and secular. All life is sacred 
The natural world and the natural life of man are né 
diabolical or undivine, and religion a revolt against ni 
ture. Religion is rather the realization of man’s t 
nature in fellowship with God. 

In such a view of religion there is no room for an 
one-sided subjectivism. The Holy Spirit is the imma 
nent God. The divine grace is as pervasive as the light 
Regeneration is not a donum superadditum, a strang 
unnatural process wrought upon the soul by an alie 
force ; it is the illumination and moral quickening of th 
soul by the eternal Light when the life is thrown open t 
welcome its full presence and power. Darkness reign 
only where the light is excluded. The divine Spir 
presses in upon every life as the light floods the world a 
the dawn of day. As well say that the sunlight and 
teeming life of nature are foreign and essentially hostil 
to each other as that God and the natural life of ma 
which flowed from him are alien and opposed. God 1 
hostile, not to the nature, but to the persistent unnatural 
ness of man; the contrast is not between the divine an 
the natural, but between the divine and the unnat 
The natural life of man is the religious life ; the reali 
tion of his true idea is the Christian character. 

















ss er rm rr 





‘ 


THE CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 491 


Sanctification is the progressive attainment of union 
with God. It is growth in Godlikeness — the increasing * 
realization of the mind of Christ. It is not a special, ec- 
static experience, though special experiences may promote 
it. It is the development of the Christian character and 
is not, therefore, attained at a bound, though there may 
be crises in life which involve sudden and great forward 
movements in its realization. It is not a mere emotional 
state of desire or aspiration after perfection; it is an 
actual identification of the will with goodness, a progres- 
sive achievement of the Christian virtues, a growth into 
the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. The 
test of sanctification is simple but very searching ; it is 


this: likeness to God as he is revealed and interpreted in 


Jesus Christ. To sum up all in few words: Religion is 
the union of man with God, the Godlike life, the Christian 
character — which is salvation. 


CHAPTER XIII 


SALVATION AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
















THE idea of the Kingdom of God has been made in 
recent years the subject of much careful research and 
vigorous discussion. Its Old Testament presuppositions 
its original and later forms, the questions whether it is 2 
temporary or a universally applicable conception, whether 
it denotes a present or a future fact or state, its relation 
to the notion of the Church, whether it is the central idea 
of Jesus’ teaching and how far it is available as the regu- 
lative principle of Christian theology — these are some of 
the themes which have engaged attention. I shall touch 
upon these topics only incidentally.1_ I will only say that te 
me it seems clear that the Kingdom was not, in the teach- 
ing of Jesus, primarily an eschatological conception, as so 
many scholars now maintain. It appears to have denoted 
a present fact —a form of fellowship or mode of life whiel 
men might enter upon here and now, even though its per- 
fect realization might not be attained in this world. The 
current expectation in the early Church of the near return 
of the Lord and of the end of the age naturally transformed 
it into an eschatological conception. It had already become 
such to the mind of Paul. As to the other points in dis- 
pute, I should say that the mere form of the conception 
has a local and temporary character; it is derived from 
ideas associated with the Jewish theocracy. Nevertheless 
it is the symbol of an abiding fact—the spiritual reign 
of God in the hearts of the Godlike. It was, at least, 
prominent idea of our Lord and represents one of the grea 
aims of his saving mission. 


1 They are more particularly considered in my Theology of the Ne 
Testament, Part I. ch. iii., and The Teaching of Jesus, ch. v. 
492 


7 


SALVATION AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 493 


If one were to frame a short, sharp definition of the 


_ Kingdom of God, he would inevitably narrow the idea of 








it. Not only did Jesus give no definition of it, but he 
appears to have used it in some variety of meanings. It 
is a large and more or less fluid conception. It will be 
sufficient for our purpose to employ it as the symbol of 
the social purpose and effect of the gospel. If the imme- 
diate object of Jesus’ life and labors was to renew the 
lives of individual men, there can be no doubt that, im- 
plicit in this renewal, there is the further purpose and 
effect, to reconstitute the social relations of men in 
accord with the motives and principles which he implants 
in the heart. It is true enough that Jesus dealt with 
men as individuals; he had a profound sense of the sa- 
eredness and worth of the person, but it is equally true 
that he regarded the person, not as isolated, but as impli- 
cated in a complex of relations. The love which he sought 
to kindle in human hearts is not a separating but a unit- 
ing principle ; it does not permit men to remain apart and 
indifferent to each other, but draws them together in 
mutual sympathy and reciprocal service. The gospel 
contains a social principle. Christianity is a social reli- 
gion; it finds its expression not merely in individual 
betterment but in the development of the fraternal spirit 
—not merely in an ennobled personal life, but in a new 
sense of duty to others ; Christianity can realize its aim 
in the world only in a community, a fellowship, a social 
life. For our present purpose, then, we may use the 
“Kingdom of God” to denote the reign of love among 
men, or the fellowship of men in Christian love. It em- 
braces all who are seeking to live the Godlike life ; the 
test of membership in it is sonship to God. 

The school of Ritschl has been especially active in pro- 
moting the investigation of the doctrine of the Kingdom, 
and in assigning to it a place of importance commensurate 
with that which it held in the teaching of Jesus. Ritschl 
held that the salvation of the individual could be realized 


|| only by participation in the life of the Christian commu- 


nity. For him the Spirit of God was a name for the 




























494 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTR 


knowledge of God, which Christ has made the peculia 
possession of this community. The great aim of the gos 
pel is to found a fellowship of those who, through Christ 
have come to know God as their Father and each other « 
brethren, and the resulting community becomes, in turn 
the chief depository and vehicle of the divine grace t 
mankind. The Ritschlian theology wears a strongly socia 
cast.) It lays great stress upon the Church as a means of 
grace ; only it does not locate this grace in the Church’ 
rites or organization, but in the knowledge of God, th 
fellowship with God, which is the distinguishing mark ot 
its true life. But Ritschl did not on this account iden 
tify the Church with the Kingdom. The Church is the 
organization of believers for the worship of God ; it pro- 
motes the Kingdom of God “in so far as the members ¢ 
the community give themselves to the interchange ¢ 
action prompted by love.”? The promotion of this fellow- 
ship of love, which is the principle of the Kingdom, is the 
aim of all the institutions and agencies to which religior 
gives rise. 

Some of these opinions of Ritschl were, undoubte 


form ; but they serve all the better, perhaps, to thrust 
upon our attention some considerations which are eithe 
too much neglected or viewed in an equally one-sidec 
way in traditional dogmatics. When, for example, salve 
tion is viewed as an isolated experience of the individual 
—as it has been so extensively viewed in Protestant the- 
ology, — the tendency is to lose sight of a large part of 
the real meaning of salvation; namely, a life of recip. 
rocal duties and services, animated by love. The chie 
emphasis in this mode of viewing the subject lie 
upon the exemption of the individual from suffering i 
a future state. In proportion as the individual is con 
ceived as saved wholly by and for himself, the tendency 
is also likely to be to emphasize as the primary conditior 
of salvation some conviction or opinion which the persor 


1‘ Religion is always social.” Justification and Reconciliation, p. 578 
2 Op. cit., p. 290. 




















SALVATION AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 495 


concerned is urged to make his own. Who that has 
_ observed religious movements at all closely, has not often 
heard an account of the process of salvation of which the 
following would be a fair outline : You must, first of all, 
believe that Christ has paid your debt to God for you; 
accepting this for true, you are released from the burden 
of your guilt and from liability to punishment in the 
world to come; as an additional assurance of heaven, it 
will now be your duty to join this or that church, which, 
by its divinely authenticated organization, or its correct 
theological theories or ritual practices, offers superior 
guaranties for your future safety. 
If to this it be said, on the one hand, that the statement 
| is very one-sided, and, on the other, that it covers impor- 
tant truths, | grant the correctness of both remarks. It 
purports to be the statement of a one-sided case, and the 
point is that it has been, on a very large scale, an actual 
method of presenting the claims and benefits of religion. 
Beyond question, important truths are emphasized, — for- 
giveness and release from punishment,—but others are 
overlooked or obscured in such representations. Salvation 
is mostly personal insurance ; the mottois: Flee for safety 
_—every man for himself! But the question is: What is 
_ safety, and where is safety to be found in God’s world? 
_ Am I making surest of safety when I am giving supreme 
attention to the question how I can make certain of my 
personal happiness in a future world, regardless, perhaps, 
of how much misery I cause for others here ? 

The realization of salvation is, in important respects, a 
social experience. Doubtless there is a sense in which 
_ salvation concerns the direct relation of each individual 
soul to God; yet this is a very inadequate account of the 
matter. Is the relation of the soul to God correctly con- 
ceived in the popular thought which pictures God as 
_ seated in the heavens above us and as relating himself to 
us, as one may say, only from above downward? Are we 
related to God only vertically, and not also laterally ? Do 


+ we not come into contact with him in and through his 





| world, and especially in and through his Spirit which abides 


































496 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


in the believing community? He may, indeed, be con 
ceived as acting upon us directly, immediately; no doub 
he does so. But it must be just as true that the divine 
life touches and penetrates our life indirectly or mediately 
through our divinely constituted relations, such as those 
of the family and the Church. It is chiefly through these 
agencies, so far as we can judge, that we have received 
our knowledge of God and have come into the fellowship 
of his life. Most of us have, in fact, realized our salva- 
tion, that is, attained the conviction and consciousness 
of sonship to God, through that revelation of God to us 
which is the possession and inspiration of the Christian 
society of which we are a part. 

I would raise the question whether the conception that 
salvation is a purely individual affair, is not really a cor- 
ollary of the doctrine of the divine transcendence, held 
and applied in a one-sided way. If God is remanded in 
thought to some distant region, and is conceived of as so 
highly exalted above our world as to have little real, prac- 
tical relation with it, do we not have in that conception 
the root of the individualistic view of salvation? If, now, 
we supplement this idea with that of the divine imma- 
nence, and say that just as truly as “ God’s in his heaven,” 
so truly is he also in his world; if he is to be found of us 
not so much by ascending into the heights or descending 
into the depths as by opening our eyes to the evidences of 
his presence which are very near us, then do we not find 
in such a view the basis for the social idea of salvation? 
It seems to me that the two conceptions of our subject 
under review correspond, in general, to the conceptions of 
the divine transcendence and the divine immanence, re- 
spectively, and really arise out of these differing ideas of 
God’s relation to the world. 

It should be added that the two views in question are not 
necessarily inconsistent with each other, and that they be- 
come so only when they are held ina one-sided way. They 
are no more inconsistent than the transcendence and imma- 
nence of God are inconsistent with each other. They are 
complementary, not contradictory. If the life of God is not 

















SALVATION AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 497 


exhausted in the world ; if he is more than all his mani- 
festations in nature and history, it surely does not follow 
that he is not expressed or that he does not vitally dwell 
in the world which has its being in him. If God, in some 
mysterious way, directly touches and influences our life, 
that fact is in no way inconsistent with his lateral ap- 
proach to us through our social relations in family, school, 
and Church. It is, perhaps, abstractly conceivable that 
salvation should be realized by the individual in entire 
isolation from all human influences and agencies, but 
really this is hardly more than a purely theoretic supposi- 
tion. Few men, if any, have ever lived so isolated a life 
as this supposition assumes. Men are, in fact, implicated 
in a complex of relations with their fellows and, in gen- 
eral, they realize their life in and through these relations. 
Philosophers tell us that only in such a relational life is 
mental development possible. Self-consciousness itself 
unfolds by a process of action and reaction. Reciprocity 
is a law of life. The same principle has its application in 
religion. The religious life is essentially social. “No 
man liveth to himself,” whether in the later developments 
of the religious life or in its earlier beginnings. Christ 
died for us that we should not live unto ourselves, but 
rather take and fill our place in a society which should 
embody his Spirit and diffuse it in the life of the world. 

Our knowledge of God is mediated through history and 
through an experience which is much more complex than 
we can easily realize. Theologians have disputed whether 
men find God primarily through the Church, or through 
the Bible, or through the use of their individual reason. 
Such disputes proceed upon false antitheses. In practice 
there is no such thing as an isolated individual reason in- 
vestigating and appropriating religious truths all alone 
__ by itself. The moment such an individual reads another 
_ man’s book, hears another man’s discourse, or enters into 
_ any form of intercourse with other men respecting reli- 
gious truth and life, that moment he is a sharer with others 
in the common religious life and convictions. But even 
if he did none of these things, how could he escape the 


498 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


. atmosphere of religious thought and experience in which 
he has grown up and lives? As well say that he can live 
his physical life apart from the surrounding air. ; 

But does not man find salvation in the Bible? The 
current popular way of urging that this is the case is often 
closely kindred to that which we observe to have been 
common in our Lord’s time. ‘“ Ye search the Scriptures,” 
said Jesus to his contemporaries, “ because ye think that 
in them ye have eternal life ” (Jn. v. 39), but he intimates” 
that they do not find it there. In the Scriptures we ac- 
quaint ourselves with the saving experience of multitudes 
of men, with the principles of life and duty, with a full 
and adequate account of the way of salvation; but the 
bare knowledge of these facts and truths does not con- 
stitute salvation. We must make them our truths; we 
must repeat them in our own life; we must enter into 
analogous experiences. ‘This we can do only by an ac- 
tivity and appropriation of our own. In this appropriation 
our reason, that is, our total capacity to know and embrace 
truth, is engaged. To suppose that we find salvation in 
the Bible as if it were a kind of commodity which we can 
take up and carry away with us, is a conception appropri- 
ate only to a juvenile stage of religious thought. There 
is no such thing as deriving salvation from the Bible apart 
from the rational and vital realization in experience of 
those truths and laws of life which the Bible describes 
and illustrates. I mention these points in order to show 
how unwarranted are some of the separations and rivalries 
made in popular polemics among the various “ sources ” of 
the knowledge of God and of salvation. When one re- 
members that salvation is a Godlike personal life, it is 
evident that salvation is in experience and character. In 
any proper meaning of words it can no more reside in the 
Bible than the life of plants can reside in a text-book on 
botany. 

A further consideration is still more germane to our 
subject — the social or corporate aspect of the experience 
of salvation. We cannot, without the greatest arbitrari- 
ness, separate the Bible from the Church in the sense 
































SALVATION AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 499 


which the word “ Church ” originally bore— the congrega- 
tion of Christian believers. But for sucha community there 
never would have been such a compilation of books as the 
New Testament. The books of that collection are largely 
themselves the product and record of the religious experi- 
ence of the early Church. Apart from that experience, 
| that Christian community-life in the new knowledge of 
God and sense of his presence given through Christ, these 
books never could have arisen — much less have been 
_ collected and preserved. When, therefore, a man in the 
utmost conceivable isolation sits down with his Bible, 
determined, perhaps, to find God alone by the aid of this 
_ book, he is really making himself a partner with the 
believers of the first age who treasured the words of 
Christ and drew out their applications of his teaching 
to life in the glow of that enthusiasm and the warmth of 
| that love to men which so suffuse the New Testament as 
to make it the classic of all Christian literature. 
_ How preposterous to separate the Bible and the Church, 
and to discuss from which of the two we derive the saving 
_ knowledge of God! Alike in Bible and in Church we 
are relating ourselves to a collective Christian experience 
‘and life. In any adequate view of the subject, Bible, 
Church, and reason all codperate to the same end. Just 


| under the influence and with the codperation of other 
‘minds, so the religious life is realized in a community of 
- conviction and experience. 

It is not meant, of course, that there are no proper ap- 


the later developments of ecclesiastical dogma. We may 
compare the creeds of Christendom with the teaching of 


| and wide. In this sense one may say: I will adhere 
‘to the Bible as against the (later) Church; I will hold 
to the teaching of Jesus and of the apostles as against the 
more elaborate formulations of theological doctrine. But 


500 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 














such a determination is not properly described as a choice 
between Bible and Church. It is rather a choice between 
the Church of one age and the Church of another, or 
between the view of religion which was presented by 
the Founder of Christianity and was expounded by his 
apostles and their associates, and views which have beer 
elaborated in later times under what may be held to have 
been foreign influences. 

These considerations are intended to illustrate the 
fact that, in actual experience, God becomes known to 
us, and our salvation in fellowship with him is mediated, 
through a great variety of means which are social and 
may be summed up in the term, “the Kingdom of God.” 
The means of grace have predominantly this character, 
The study of Sacred Scripture and of all Christian 
history and literature, the public worship of God, the 
celebration of the sacraments of the Church—these and 
all such aids to the Christian life signify our participation 
in the fellowship of the believing community. The forces 
which are summed up in the family are of this character. 
The bearing of heredity in creating the presumptions of 
our moral development, the influence of a religious spirit 
in the home, the power of paternal example — these are, 
as we may say, God’s natural means of grace for the 
promotion of the Christian life in mankind. 

This principle is, indeed, recognized, in some form 
and degree, among Christians universally. Nevertheless, 
not infrequently, a one-sided individualism has virtually 
nullified the principle and has, in effect, denied it in 
practice. For example, the conception to which refer- 
ence has already been made, that the natural life of man 
is totally alienated from God and from all goodness, has 
powerfully tended to rob the family of its true signifi- 
cance in the founding and fostering of the Kingdom of 
God. In this view the native instincts of love and ser- 
vice, and such impulses to kindness, generosity, and the 
like as men might inherit and foster, were, at the most, 
only “civil” virtues. Some of the older divines woul 
not call them virtues in any sense, but would brand ther 

















SALVATION AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 501 


as vices, deserving not the approval but the wrath of God. 
But to take the distinction between natural and spiritual 
oodness only in the milder form in which Edwards 


On the contrary, the views in question set the natural 
and the supernatural in sharpest contrast and contradic- 
tion. In the natural man there was said to be no spark 
or germ of goodness; his mere natural affection, his 


1. ae 


insignificant and valueless. The children were as desti- 
te of any scintilla of goodness and divineness as their 


= paieinenaleneemneisietneaiaaniemmnerita 


from their earliest existence only the poison of sin. The 
writings of the older divines teem with examples of this 


0 the Sabbath day, and for fear of being seen I did it 
behind the door. A great reproach of God! a specimen 
that atheism I brought into the world with me!” 


_ As has been already intimated, philosophy has already 
provided us with a partial antidote to such conceptions in 
its doctrine of the immanent God. It has opened the way 
fo a different view of nature and man. It is certainly no 
lew view, for it pervades our ancient Scriptures; it is 
ather a.recovery of a conception which had been obscured, 
r even lost, in the deistic and dualistic orthodoxy which 
as so long dominated the thoughts of men. It has not 
been sufficiently considered by theologians, and has hardly 
ntered the popular mind at all, that the changes which 


502 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


are going on now in theology are chiefly due neither to 
historic and literary research — important as these are 

nor to the native perverseness and wanton irreligiousness 
of those who are breaking with dogmatic tradition, but 
to a changed conception of God — his character, his 
method of action, and his relation to the world and mar 
Those who wish to arrest the tide of modern thought on 
the problems of religion should direct their attention t 
the real logical source and cause of the movement. Noth- 
ing could be more futile and irrelevant than merely 






resent the application of criticism to venerable tre di- 
tions. Such protests can effect nothing unless men car 
be convinced that they ought to return to the earlier cor 
ception of a remote Deity, of an undivine or demoniacal 
world, and of an order of natural processes and laws con- 
trived and operated for man’s ruin and not for his better- 
ment. In a word, theological reconstruction must and 
will go on while men continue to believe in evolution, i 
the immanence of God, in the fundamental unity of the 
natural and the supernatural, and in the laws of naturt 
and the instincts of man’s life as God’s universal method 
of gracious operation. 

Christianity, then, is not a foreign importation into the 
world. It is not a system of recondite speculations which 
men have elaborated. It was not argued into existence. 
It is not here because theologians are defending it, nor 
would it leave the world if all these should argue 
against it. It is here because God is in his world ant 
because the life of God is the light of men. It is her 
because God has revealed himself to man and discloset 
man to himself in Christ, and has taught us in him wha 
sonship to God is and how we may attain it. Now the 
experience of salvation is the realization of these truths 
It is the recognition of an ever present God and th 
ennobling and sanctifying of what we call our natural lif 
and common relations by seeing and fulfilling them all 
as sacred and divine. ‘True religion does not consist 


SALVATION AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 503 


much in doing special and extraordinary things as in 
doing all things with a sense of their dignity and value — 
a connecting of all duties with God and with our own son- 
ship to him. 

In such a view of religion, salvation cannot be a mere 
isolated, individual experience. It involves the fulfilment 
of the relations in which God has set us. Religion is the 
life of love, and love is a relational affair. It means sym- 
pathy, fraternity, service. The increased dominance of 
such a mode of life is the coming of the Kingdom of God. 
Now the individual fulfils the ideal of the Christian life 
only in a partial manner if he does not in some way help 
to promote this reign of love among men. And how can 
he be called a Christian at all who, whatever his beliefs 
or technically religious acts, makes it the chief aim of his 
life to defeat and oppress others and in wanton selfishness 
to trample on the God-given rights of other men? It 
matters not what may be a man’s opinions, though they be 
the most authoritatively approved and as correct as their 
most ardent supporters suppose them to be; it matters 
not what church he patronizes nor how generously, nor 
in what sacraments he participates, if his life defies the 
principles of that Kingdom of love and helpfulness to 
which Christ gave the law, he cannot abide the test which 
the Master applied when he spoke of those who call him 
Lord, Lord, but did not the things which he com- 
_ manded, and of those who even prophesied and did many 
_ wonderful works in his name, to whom, nevertheless, he 

was compelled to say, I never knew you; you never 

lived in my company ; between us there is no kinship of 
_ spirit ; we are strangers. 

The conception of salvation as sonship to God, and as 
‘inyolving consequent brotherhood among men, supplies 
the key for determining the relation of the Church and 
° of all particular sects or parts of it, and of all the various 

institutions and agencies of religion, to the Kingdom of 
love, the reign of ‘the Spirit of Christ in the world. It 

‘seems clear, on the one hand, that the Church and the 
Kingdom cannot be identified, unless the word “ Church” 








504 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


is used in a highly idealized sense. If we mean by the 
Church the congeries of organizations which call them- 
selves by that name, and by the Kingdom of God the 
reign of Christian love, then certainly we cannot say 
that Church and Kingdom are, in any sense, synonymous. 
There has been too much that was unchristian in organized — 
Christianity and too much Christlike goodness outside all” 
churches, to permit us to say that the Church and King- 
dom are one and the same, or the same thing viewed from 
different sides. The Church, however, is an aid and, as 1 
think, despite all its faults, the most effective instrument 
in the promotion of the Kingdom of God among men. It 
may be said that in proportion as the Church realizes its 
ideal, it would become coincident with the Kingdom, 
that it would then include all the forces of Christian 
goodness within itself, and exclude all that is at variance 
with the Spirit of Christ. But is such an ideal ever 
realizable in an organization which must always be, in a 
sense, a human institution? The Church is administered 
by fallible men ; it is composed, as it must be and should 
be, of imperfect men ; it is a hospital for those who need 
help and strength, and not a paradise for the perfectly 
sanctified. Is it possible for such an institution, or for 
any one of a number of such institutions, to represen 
more than approximately the ideals of the Kingdom o 
God? To me it seems to be no reproach of the Christi 
Church to say that it is not possible. 

Recognizing this difference between Church and 
Kingdom, and reminding us how much our Lord 
had to say of the Kingdom and how infrequently 
he used the word “Church” (Mt. xvi. 18; xviii: 
17), some have drawn the conclusion that Jesus di 
not contemplate the founding of any organization suc 
as we now denote by that term. It is certainly true that 
the word “Church,” as used in the passages just cited, 
carries quite different associations from those which i 
bears in our modern usage. celesia is the Greek mame 
for the assembly or congregation of Israel. In Christian 
usage it denotes the collective believing community 

















* heel 














SALVATION AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 505 


Accordingly, our earlier English translations rendered the 
word “congregation,” and not “Church.” In the Bishops’ 
Bible (1568), for example, we read in Mt. xvi. 18, 
“Upon this rock I will build my congregation.” It was 
not until the appearance of our so-called “authorized,” 
or King James’s, version (1611) that the earlier rendering 
of ecclesia was supplanted by the word “ Church.” Origi- 
nally this term denoted a congregation, brotherhood, or 
community; now it denotes an outwardly organized 
society with officers and laws. Hence Dr. Hort very 
justly remarks: “The English term ‘Church,’ now the 
most familiar representative of ecclesia to most of us, 
carries with it associations derived from the institutions 
and doctrines of later times, and thus cannot at present, 
without a constant mental effort, be made to convey 
the full and exact force which originally belonged to 
ecclesia.” } 

This fact, however, does not seem to me to warrant 
the conclusion that the formal organization of believers 
for more effective codperation was no part of the plan 
of Christ. It is certain, indeed, that Christ did not 
formally organize what, in modern parlance, we should 
call a Church. He did, however, call twelve men into 
permanent association with himself and give to them a 
certain official character as his representatives and mes- 
sengers. The apostles were the chief human agents in 
teaching Christ’s truth and in founding and fostering 
churches after the Master’s departure ; and such I cannot 
doubt they were intended to be. Here, then, we see the 
nucletis of an organization or congeries of organizations. 
The life of faith and love needed a visible form of mani- 
festation. Provision must be made for common worship, 
fellowship, and work. The truth of the Kingdom reign- 
ing in the hearts of men will have its social expression, 
however inadequate such expression may prove to be. It 
appears to me, therefore, a reasonable inference that Jesus 
contemplated the organization of his disciples into a for- 
mally constituted society as the consequence of the King- 


1 The Christian Ecclesia, p. 1. 


506 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


dom’s nature and working and as the most effective — 
instrument for its promotion. That the Kingdom may 
most effectually leaven the life of the world, it must avail 
itself of the power which resides in the social instincts of 
men, and in the common sympathies and increased actiy- 
ity which these social instincts foster. The Kingdom of 
God is far more and greater than any church or all 
churches, but the Kingdom needs and uses churches as 
means essential to the accomplishment of its ends. 

But whatever may have been the conscious purpose of | 
Christ respecting the ways and means by which his truth 
was to be conserved and the life of love fostered among 
men, it is evident, in a historical view of the case, that 
the body of believers could never have held together and 
persisted in their determination and effort to conquer the — 
world, without organization for codperation and disei- 
pline. They might have continued to exist as scattered 
communities and might have kept alive the flame of de-— 
votion to Christ, but they could hardly have met success- 
fully the obloquy of the world to which they were subject, 
coped with the reasoning of heathen sages, and braved the 
dread power of imperial Rome without the strength which 
comes from union and closely compacted organization. 

Certain it is that, as time went on, the Church devoted 
herself to many objects which were not contemplated in 
our Lord’s teaching concerning the coming of the Kingdom 
and in some cases were even radically contradictory of it. 
In the Church’s success lay at once her great opportunity 
and her great temptation and danger. Such facts only 
make it the more evident that the test of her usefulness — 
is the question whether she is serving and promoting the 
interests of the Kingdom of God—the fellowship of the 
Godlike —the prevalence of the Spirit of Christ among 
men. It matters not how compact and effective her out- 
ward organization, how elaborate and logically cogent 
her system of doctrine, how well authenticated and 
“valid” her ministry and sacraments—if the Church 
does not further the Kingdom of God, the reign of love, © 
among men; if she does not promote brotherhood and 


/ 





SALVATION AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD 507 


helpfulness ; if she does not foster the Christian virtues 
and enjoin the Christian duties; in a word, if she does 
not seek first God’s Kingdom and righteousness and lay 
chief stress upon the Christlike life of sonship to God, 
then has she, just so far, apostatized from Christ. It 
matters not how outwardly historical or demonstrably 
continuous with antiquity a ministry is if it is worldly 
and selfish. It requires something more than formal re- 
_ semblance to primitive usage to render sacraments means 
_ of grace. No Church is truly catholic which has not 
‘Christ’s spirit of universal love: nor is it apostolic if 
destitute of that consecration and zeal which fired the 
_ Church of the first age with a passion for the salvation 
| ofmen. All Churches have shown great deference to the 
_ rites and usages of the primitive Church and to the theo- 
| logical opinions of the apostles ; it is no disparagement of 
these usages and opinions to say that the reproduction 
of their religious spirit, their subordination to the ideals 
of the Christlike life, is far more important. Ifa modern 
_ Church could imitate, without the smallest variation, all 
_ the practices of primitive Christianity, and if all its mem- 
! bers could succeed in entertaining precisely the opinions 
_ and conceptions of Peter, Paul, John, and the rest, without 
a addition or subtraction,—that would not make said 
Church truly apostolic, —all such imitation would avail 
nothing without the reproduction of the apostolic spirit. 
The mission of the Church is to promote the Kingdom of 
God in the world. In proportion as a Church does that, 
it is true to Christ ; in proportion as it does not do that, 
it fails of its mission. Worse still, if it devotes itself to 
engendering envy, partisan strife, enmity, and contention, 
it is an apostate Church, be its organization, ritual, and 
orthodoxy what they may ! 
The life and life-work of Jesus prescribe the purpose of 
the Church because they define the nature of the King- 
dom. The law for both is the law of the Spirit of life 
that was in Christ Jesus. He is the Head of both King- 
dom and Church. And what are the watchwords of his 
authority and rule? We hear them in such sayings as 
































508 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE © 


these: He that serves most is greatest in my Kingdom; 
in order to enter into it, men must become as little chil- 
dren; take up the cross and follow after me if you wot 
enter with me into my Kingdom. Christ is not a King in 
spite of his humility, lowliness, and meekness, but because 
of them. They are the badges of his royalty and the 
pledges of his victory. Servant of all and therefore King 
—such is the paradox of Jesus. Meek and lowly, 
rides into the sacred city, not on a horse, the symbol of 
war, but on an ass, the symbol of peace, fulfilling thus the 
prophetic word : — 
“ Tell ye the daughter of Zion, 
Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, 


Meek, and riding upon an ass, 
And upon a colt the foal of an ass.” + 


What a contrast to the kings of earth with their pomps 
and pageantry, their triumphal arches and captive trains! 
But no worldly monarch was ever so sure of his dominior 
and victory as was Jesus Christ. He was certain of th 
ultimate triumph of meekness, gentleness, and love. 
foresaw victories such as no earthly potentate ever dared 
anticipate. He predicted for himself a dominion such 
as no worldly “ votary of glory” ever dared aspire to il 
his dreams. He beheld Satan falling as lightning from 
heaven. He saw his Kingdom of love spreading like 
leaven in the earth until the whole should be leavened. 
Under the shadow of his cross and in the very hour 0 
apparent defeat he dared to tell his accusers that from 
that very moment they would see the Son of man coming 
on the clouds of heaven (Mt. xxvi. 64; Mk. xiv. 62 
Lk. xxii. 69), and predicted that from his cross he would 
draw all men unto himself (Jn. xii. 32). Nothing can 
cloud his certainty that all power in heaven and on earth 
is at his command, and that, at length, his hand shall leac 
the world, bound in golden chains of love, unto the fee 
of God. Absolute faith in the power of meekness, the 
victory of patience, the dominion of love—that is th 
strange, incomparable wonder of Jesus Christ. 

1 Zech, ix. 9; cf. Mt. xxi. 5. 











CHAPTER XIV 
SALVATION AND HUMAN DESTINY 


PREVAILING popular usage refers salvation to a future 
state or world. To be saved means to escape punishment 
and to attain eternal blessedness after death. As we have 
seen, the New Testament use of the terms “ salvation’ and 
“eternal life” is not predominantly eschatological. Jesus 
spoke of men entering the Kingdom here and now, of a 
present possession of eternal life in the saving knowledge 
of God. Salvation is a present fact. But the outlook of 
Jesus into a life beyond this makes salvation include or 
involve also, as a prominent part of its meaning, a future 
consummation. ‘The imperfections and limitations of this 
present life prevent the full realization here of the Chris- 
tian idea of salvation. Hence the eschatological use of the 
term, though often too exclusive, is explained and justi- 
fied. ‘Weare saved in hope.” Though confident of our 
sonship to God, we know that it does not yet appear what 
we shall be. 

What salvation in the future life will be, under what 
conditions it will be realized, what will be its scope and 
who may hope to be its subjects — these and similar ques- 
tions have been fruitful themes of speculation and discus- 


sion. Inthe Greek and Roman Catholic churches the idea 


of an intermediate state between this world and the final 
condition of men has been elaborately developed and 
applied. Those who die repentant expiate their sins by 
disciplinary penances in purgatory, by which they will be 
fitted, at length, for a heaven of perfect blessedness. In- 
asmuch as the priesthood was supposed to possess a certain 
power to control and regulate these expiatory chastise- 


- ments, the Reformers saw in the doctrine of purgatory a 


509 


510 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


potent means for ecclesiastical domination, dangerous in 
tendency and fraught with grave abuses in practice. They 
accordingly repudiated not only the specific doctrine in 
question, but the idea of a middle state in every form of 
it, apparently on the view that the surest way to be rid of ~ 
purgatory was to leave no place where it could be located. 

The traditional Protestant doctrine thus became very 
simple. All men at death pass immediately into heaven 
or hell—a final state of blessedness or of misery. The 
Westminster creeds embody the doctrine in typical form. 
There are, we are told, but “two places for souls” after — 
death, — heaven and hell. ‘The souls of the righteous — 
being then” (that is, at death!) “made perfect in holi- — 
ness, are received into the highest heavens,” etc.; but the 
article goes on to say that they are still disembodied ; for 
their spiritual bodies they must wait until the resurrection 
and final judgment. ‘“ The souls of the wicked are cast into 
hell” (also, by implication, at their death), “where they 
remain in torments and utter darkness, reserved to the — 
judgment of the great day.”? In this view, then, salya- 
tion, in its eschatological aspect, involves: (1) the perfect- 
ing of the soul in holiness at death and its immediate : 
reception into heaven; (2) the continuance of the soul in 
heaven in a disembodied state until the resurrection and — 
last judgment; (3) the repose of the body in the grave 
from the time of death until the general resurrection, 
when it is raised up from the ground, endowed with new 
qualities, and reunited to the soul.? Such is the tradi- 
tional Protestant doctrine. It is obvious that it involves 
the absolute fixation of final destiny at death for every 
human being —the impossibility of recovery to holiness 
for all who have died impenitent. 

While this has been commonly regarded as the ortho- 
dox view of human destiny, in the sense in which the 
theory of vicarious punishment is the orthodox view of 


1 Shorter Catechism, Q. 37: ‘*The souls of believers are at their 
death made perfect in holiness,’’ etc. 

2 Confession, ch. xxxii. 1. 

8 See Confession, ch. xxxii., and Larger Catechism, Q. 86. 




































SALVATION AND HUMAN DESTINY Fi WT 


onement, there have not been wanting, especially within 
recent years, numerous and wide departures from it. 
Among these we may note the theories of conditional 
immortality, of continuous moral opportunity in the life 
beyond, and of universal restoration. 
The first of these theories has been held in a consider- 
able variety of forms and on a variety of grounds, but, in 
general, it aims to establish the view that good men live 
forever and that bad men cease to exist. “To be, or not 
to be —that is the question.” In its cruder form this 
theory maintains that God, who made man, may, for sutii- 
cient reasons, unmake him. If man proyes false to his 
divine ideal, if by sin he persistently continues unprofita- 
ble and injurious, God will blot him out of being; in scrip- 
ral language, if he only cumbers the ground, he will be 
t down. This form of the doctrine is called annihila- 
fionism. More commonly, the general theory that the 
wicked at length cease to be is held in some such form 
s this: Sin is, by its very nature, a soul-destroying power. 
Tf persisted in, it will put an end to the sinner’s existence. 
God does not, by a positive act, annihilate the sinner; he 
simply leaves him to the operation and effect of his evil 
course, and he forfeits his existence by his own self-destruc- 
tive persistence in sin. This argument is fortified by 
such scriptural sayings as: “The soul that sinneth, it 
shall die” (that is, cease to be) (Ezek. xviii. 4); “He 
that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son 
hath not the life” (the principle and guaranty of con- 
tinued existence) (1 Jn. v.12). A metaphysical ground- 
work is often sought for this theory in the contention that 
man is naturally mortal in the sense that he ceases to be 
unless by a fulfilment of the positive condition of contin- 
uance in being he attains eternal life (that is, perpetual 
existence); unless he “lays hold on eternal life” in this 
sense, he expires, as it were, by the statute of limitations. 
y nature man is destined to extinction; “God alone 
hath immortality” (1 Tim. vi. 16). It will be noticed 
that these variations, within this general type of theory, 
are not slight. There is a wide difference between God's 


512 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 



























annihilating sinners and sinners annihilating themselves 
by their own action. Again, if cessation of existence is 
the law of man’s natural being, it is wholly unnecessary 
to appeal to the soul-destroying power of sin to explain 
his disappearance. Cause non sunt multiplicande sine 
necessitate. The two causes assigned— natural perishabil 
ity and soul-annihilating sin—are quite diverse, and either, 
if real, is sufficient to explain the alleged result. If man 
is in this respect exactly like the brutes, it is a waste of 
time to quote Scripture or to theorize about sin. If he 
ceases to be by reason of his nature, it is more than super- 
fluous —it is positively incorrect — to say that he ceases 
to be by reason of his sins. It would be purely gratuitous 
to pile up arguments to prove that the naturally perish 
able animal ceases to be. 

Viewed on its positive side, this theory is that salvation 
is, primarily, continuance in existence. We are saved 
from extinction by obedience to God or by union with 
Christ. Not that the moral aspects of salvation are ex 
cluded or omitted, but the chief stress, especially in the 
more metaphysical form of the doctrine, must lie upon 
escape from our natural fate and the achievement of con- 
tinued existence by union with the Source of life (in the 
sense of perpetuity of being). The exegetical argument 
for the theory all turn upon this primary point. The 
“death,” which in Scripture is declared to be the wages 
of sin, is interpreted to mean, primarily, extinction; the 
“life,” which Christ came to bestow, is endless continu. 
ance in being. These terms are viewed as primaril} 
metaphysical; their ethical import is secondary, however 
important. It is probable that the principal motive 
the theory in question has been to escape the difficulties” 
inherent in the conception of endless, irremediable misery.’ 

A second aberration from orthodoxy is the belief 
continued moral progress for the good in the future life, 


1 Though holding that ‘‘the annihilation of living beings is no remedy 
for sin,” Dr. Tymms adds that ‘‘a non-survival of inveterately wicked 
men would appear to our minds more congruous with the divine natu 
and purposes than the preservation of incurable sinners in consciou 
misery and persistent wickedness forever.’? Atonement, pp. 161, 162. 


SALVATION AND HUMAN DESTINY 513 


or even in opportunity for repentance and conversion on 
the part of some (or many, or all) who were not Chris- 
tian believers here. Some have only gone so far as to 
maintain that heaven will be a sphere of moral progress. 
The evil which inheres in the characters of good men, it 
_ is urged, cannot be conceived as eradicated in a moment. 
_ How should the transition which we call death effect such 
__ a transformation of character instanter? That would be a 
_ magical change, contrary to all our knowledge of moral 
_ progress and out of analogy with all that happens to us 
inthis world. Hence some have questioned the assertion 
_ that believers were “ made perfect in holiness” at death 
__ as unwarranted and inconceivable, and have supposed that 
_they entered rather through the gate of death upon a new 
stage of moral progress. 
i But it is evident that if any of these suggestions be 
_ adopted, it is hardly possible to stop with hou Any 
one of them is an entering wedge which inevitably cleaves 
asunder the compact affirmations of the traditional theory. 
If the moral life of the good is not absolutely static from 
- the moment of death, is it certain that the moral condition 
of all who were not in this life prevailingly good, is abso- 
 lutely fixed and changeless? Some have ventured to 
intimate that they did not feel sure that such was the 
case; others have braved ecclesiastical perils by assert- 
4 ing a positive inclination to the belief that there might 
_ be future “ probation” for those to whom Christ had not 
| been made known here; still others have made bold to 
- declare that they could see no reason to suppose that the 
' event of death necessarily marked, for every soul, the 
' dividing line between the sphere of moral opportunity or 
_ change and the state of fixed and final destiny. Those who 
have followed the discussions of this subject in detail have 
| been obliged to school themselves in nice distinctions. 
‘ = Some ecclesiastical authorities, for example, insisted upon 
| repudiating candidates for the ministry who asserted 























| rather thought so. Some advocates of the theory of 





























514 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE — 


future moral opportunity held that it would continue 
indefinitely ; others that it would last but for the brief 
moment during which the soul was passing from the 
body. The former was called probation after death; 
the latter probation after breath. Some restricted this 
probation to infants,! others to infants and idiots. Some 
limited it to certain heathen; others extended it to all 
heathen; while still others, not finding where to draw the 
line, more or less positively asserted their belief that the 
method of God was essentially the same in all times and 
for all classes, and that moral recovery would be possible 
wherever and whenever any soul would choose to repent 
of sin and turn to God in humble surrender and trust. 
But not to enter further into the details of these recent 
eschatological controversies, one general result of them 
cannot be doubtful: the discussion has issued in a very 
common questioning and widespread modification of 
traditional opinions. 

Not a few, following the lines of thought already re- 
ferred to, have adopted the “larger hope” for mankind 
in general. If there is no sufficient reason to suppose 
that death is, in all cases, the dividing line between 
moral opportunity and final destiny, can it be showr 
that it is so for any class of persons? If the traditional 


an opportunity for the conversion of “sinful infants” 
in the world to come, why draw the line just there? 
Is any later sin more blameworthy than that first fatal 
transgression in which the infants in question are alleged 
to have participated? That primordial sin is declared to 


1Tf all infants are ‘‘in a state of sin’? (Dr. Strong), and if salvation 
is contingent upon repentance and faith, or personal acceptance 
Christ, there is no possibility of their salvation except through a gracious 
opportunity offered in a future life. This view has afforded a weleome 
relief to some who would fain believe that all dying in infancy, and not 
merely ‘elect infants,” are saved. Dr, Strong, e.g., says: ** It seems 
most probable that the work of regeneration may be performed by the 
Spirit in connection with the infant soul’s first view of Christ in the 
other world... . The first moment of consciousness for the infant may 
be coincident with a view of Christ the Saviour, which accomplishes the 
entire sanctification of its nature.” Systematic Theology, p. 357. 


SALVATION AND HUMAN DESTINY 515 























be sufficient to render every human being guilty from the 
very moment of birth, and, in consequence, an object of 
the wrath of God. If, then, for such infants equity seems 
to require a future opportunity for choice and decision, on 
the ground that they have had no such opportunity here, 
_ who shall say that there are not others who, quite as truly 
as young children, die ina moralinfancy? Have not count- 
less millions of men passed from earth without ever having 
_ had an opportunity to know anything of Christ or of the 
_ truths which he represents? Thus the “larger hope” is 
_ gradually extended from infants to moral incompetents 
and then to the heathen for whom often, in their condi- 
tion and circumstances, only the crudest moral develop- 
_ ment and the most elementary moral testing were possible. 
- But how, then, about the heathen in Christian lands—the 
multitudes who live and die in the slums of great cities? 
- How much moral light do many of these people have? 
_ Can it be said, in any proper sense of the terms, that 
_ Christ in his real meaning is ever presented or known 
to them? 
| In ways like this the thoughts of men run on from one 
| point to another, some venturing further in speculation or 
_ conjecture than others, according to the degree of their 
) emancipation from traditional views. The point to be 
_ noticed is that many thoughtful men have become more and 
_ more impatient with the idea that this life only is a sphere 
_of moral opportunity and progress, and that the next life 
is wholly unlike the present in this respect, — that in the 
world to come there is no possible progress or change, but 
| only, from the moment of death, an absolutely fixed fate 
involving either consummate goodness or consummate 
badness. Whether rightly or wrongly, there has been a 
| powerful revulsion of feeling, within the various divisions 
|| of Protestantism, against this conception. It appears to 
_ me that all the different modifications of it spring, in the 
-Imain, from the same cause: the impossibility of sundering 
| the future moral life of man so completely from his present 
| life and of conceiving of the world to come in a manner so 
entirely out of analogy to all that we know of moral per- 


516 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


sonality and development here. From the suggestion of 
moral progress for the good to the advocacy of the larger 
hope for mankind — all these forms of thought illustrate 
the effort to conceive the future world in some analogy 
with this, to connect the life of man there in an organie¢ 
way with his life and character here, and to show that 
God rules all worlds according to the same moral laws. 
Progressive sanctification, future probation, larger hope — 
they are all of a piece ; they differ in degree, not in kind. 
They all rest upon the same principle, variously applied. 
They are all equally opposed to the traditional Protestant 
position which excludes them by the same definitions by 
which it eliminated purgatory. 

On what ground can it be shown that death marks the 
limit of “ probation” ? Death comes to men in the great- 
est variety of circumstances —in infancy and childhood, 
suddenly, by accident, after a long or a short day of moral 
opportunity or trial. What is there about the transition 
from one form or sphere of life to another which should 
make it in all cases the dividing line between moral edu- 
cation or testing and absolute fixity of character? Is it 
not conceivable that for some men probation is practically 
at an end long before their death ? Then why may it not 
continue for others beyond death? It is not death, but 
choice and action oft-repeated and passing into character, 
which confirm the soul in evil or in good. There is no valid 
philosophical or ethical argument for the proposition that 
death necessarily ends moral opportunity, progress, or 
change, and seldom, if ever, is any effort made to construct 
such an argument. The evidence for the alleged fact is” 
declared to be of quite a different character ; it has been 
divinely revealed that death is the direct entrance to one 
of two final conditions — perfect holiness or absolute 
badness. This contention is fortified by such biblical 
expressions as: “In the place where the tree falleth, there 
it shall be” (Eccl. xi. 3) ; “He that is unjust, let him be 
unjust still,” ete. (Rev. xxii. 11); and, “ After death 
judgment ” (Heb. ix. 27). Toall this it is added that the 
eternal (alévos) punishment which is declared to be the 





SALVATION AND HUMAN DESTINY eli 


consequence of sin is absolutely endless. If, then, all men 
enter upon either endless felicity and perfect holiness or 
upon endless misery and utter badness at the moment of 
death, itis obvious that the scope of salvation is strictly 
limited to this earthly life. The traditional view is that 
it has been clearly revealed that such is the fact. 

But some difficulties, partly scriptural, partly specula- 
tive, attend this conclusion. If in all cases final destiny 
is fixed at death, what can be left for a future judgment 
to decide? If, for example, the men who lived in ancient 
times have been for thousands of years in an absolutely final 
state of holiness or wickedness, what can be meant by 
saying that they still await a final moral judgment? To 
this the traditional view replies that there still remains the 
equipment of souls with bodies at the final resurrection 
and judgment. It might also be said that the fixed state 
of all men will be at that time formally sealed or pro- 
claimed. But this answer is not so clear as one might 
fairly expect in case, as is claimed, there has been made 
an explicit divine revelation on the subject. ‘The apostle 
Paul evidently considered the clothing of the soul with its 
appropriate heavenly embodiment as essential to the hap- 
piness and perfection of the personality. Without the 
spiritual body the soul was “ unclothed ” and, in a sense 
of its imperfectness, could but wait and yearn for its 
heavenly dwelling-place. Yet we are told that all the 
inhabitants of heaven itself are in this condition and must 
remain so until an indefinitely distant future resurrection. 
On the one hand, all the good are said to have attained their 
fixed and final state, so that the idea of moral progress 
for them is excluded, and yet, on the other, they are dis- 
embodied spirits, dismembered personalities, waiting and 
longing for the redemption of their bodies. Again, if 


_ judgment follows immediately upon death as is contended 


i 


in the interest of the idea that death fixes destiny, what is 
to be done with the prevailing biblical representation that 
judgment is a future event occurring at the end of the 
age? Once more: How adjust this contention of a prac- 
tically final judgment at death with the Johannine pic- 


518 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 






























ture of a present and continuous judgment, “ Now is the 
judgment of this world” (Jn. xii. 31)? The whole sub- 
ject is difficult and it would be ungracious to make too 
much of inconsistencies in any eschatological scheme. But 
it is not inappropriate to point out that the traditional 
view is not so clear or congruous as to justify the common 
intolerance of its advocates toward all who venture to 
question it at any point, on the alleged ground that all 
questioning of it is wanton opposition to a direct revela- 
tion of God. I cannot help thinking that if God had re- 
vealed the conditions and issues of the future life so 
directly as traditionalism holds, he would have made his 
revelation both clearer and more consistent than is the 
doctrine which claims that authentication. 
It will hardly be found possible, I imagine, in either a 
philosophical or a historical view of the subject, to estab- 
lish the popular belief that this world only is a realm of 
moral development, the sole sphere of God’s saving action. 
But it may be answered: Can the opposite beliet be proved ? 
I should admit at once that it cannot. Neither view can 
be proved, and for the same reason: We have no clear 
and certain means of knowing. Let it be understood, 
then, that in this matter we are dealing with presumptions, 
hypotheses, analogies. If this had been admitted by those 
who have conducted the eschatological controversies of 
recent years, we should have been spared much of the 
bitterness and intolerance which have characterized the 
discussion. But it is one of the paradoxical, yet natural, 
incidents of theological controversy that men are likely to 
be doggedly certain in proportion as there are no grounds 
of certainty. The psychology of this fact probably is 
that the lack of evidence must be supplied by vehemence 
of assertion. Hence controversies are apt to be bitteri 
proportion to the ignorance in which they are conducted. 
He who has any proper appreciation of the limits 0 
human knowledge concerning what God may do and w 
humanity may experience beyond the bounds of this littl 
life, will have no disposition to lay claim to any adequa 
previous information. He will be slow to think himsel 


SALVATION AND HUMAN DESTINY 519 


‘one who, in such matters, has known the mind of the 
Lord or been his counsellor, and will have learned to be 
tolerant of other men’s judgments because somewhat dis- 
trustful of his own. 

_ It is with this understanding of the nature of the prob- 
lem — on the assumption that it is one which can be dealt 
with only in reverent conjecture — that I would point out 
‘some reasons for thinking that God’s work in salvation 
may have a wider field than this world presents, and may 
achieve a harvest of souls of which the results which we 
‘behold here are but the first-fruits. As we have seen, the 
‘common method of dealing with the subject has been to 
cite proof-texts, on the assumption that the biblical writers 
will have pronounced, as a matter of course, upon ques- 
tions of this character. This is certainly an unwarranted 
assumption. The only proper use of isolated phrases and 
verses in such a connection is in an unbiassed effort to de- 
termine in what direction the fundamental thoughts of a 
‘given writer look or tend. The problem is this : Is the 
Besce which prompted Christ to come to seek and to save 
‘the lost adequately conceived when it is regarded as 
‘available only for inhabitants of earth? It is not said, 
‘He who hears not, but he who believes not, shall be con- 
demned. Now if this believing is limited to the con- 
Scious acceptance of Christ here on earth, then all the 
countless millions who have never heard of him are 
hopelessly lost. How would that idea comport with 
‘the Christian conception of God? If, as Jesus said, the 
‘people of Tyre and Sidon would have repented if they 
‘had seen what the Jews saw, then on the supposition that 
“God’s grace is available in this life only, they would be 
‘condemned without ever having had any adequate oppor- 
tunity to embrace the gospel, that i is, condemned for what 
was not their fault— for not doing what, with greater 
light, they would have done. Again: If the sin against 
the Holy Spirit is not forgiven either in the present or in 
the coming age, does not that suggest that other sins may be 
forgiven in the coming age as well asin this? On the other 
side, we are reminded of the sayings about being judged 











520 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE ~ 


according to the deeds done in the body and of the words, 
“ After death judgment.” But how long after? Or is 
judgment continuous? We also read that the judgment of 
the world is now (Jn. xii. 31). These expressions in ne 
way militate against the idea of an intermediate state. 
“Judgment,” in Heb. ix. 27, is «plow, not 4 xpélors. 
the term for the final assize occurring at the end of the 
present world-age. : 
The early Church appears to have conceived the state 
beyond death after the analogy of the Hebrew idea of 
Sheol—a realm of the dead in contrast to this present 
world, but not necessarily implying fixation of destiny. 
Moral differences do indeed persist in the world beyond 
but both good and bad are in Sheol or Hades, and the 
day of final judgment is yet in the future at the end of 
the age. Now, with such conceptions, what is the likeli- 
hood as to the question whether the period between death 
and judgment will be regarded as a period of grace? 
Some probably reflected little, if at all, upon this ques 
tion; others gave forth only doubtful intimations, and there 
is no good reason to suppose that all Christian teachers 
would entertain precisely the same conceptions regarding 
it. But, in some cases, the canonical writers seem to be- 
tray a conviction that this intermediate period, at least, 
was a day of grace. The conception of Christ’s descent, in 
the spirit, to the world of the dead, which was afterward 
embodied in the “apostles’ creed,” was already entertained 
within the New Testament period. In 1 Peter we are told 
that “he went and preached to the spirits in prison, which 
aforetime were disobedient” (iii. 19, 20), and that “the 
gospel was preached even to the dead” (iv. 6). If this was 
done at that particular time, why not at other times, or even 
continually ? The early Church and the great majority 
of modern critical expositors agree that the above pas- 
sages assert a work of salvation in the world of the dead 
Now if that idea was unwarrantably developed and applied 
by the Roman Catholic Church in her doctrine of purg: 
tory, it does not follow that the idea must be both false 
and unscriptural. The fact is that the traditional view 
















SALVATION AND HUMAN DESTINY 521 


that the passages do not refer to an extension of the time 
of grace beyond the event of death, was mainly due to 
Augustine, who, after much perplexity and wavering over 
their meaning, decided on dogmatic and practical, rather 
than exegetical, grounds that the words probably did not 
refer to a saving activity of Christ in the underworld. 

Considerations of a more general character are derived 
from the difficulty, already noticed, of conceiving the 
mixed and partially formed characters of men instantly 
transformed into absolute perfection or utter wickedness 
at the moment of death. On what ground should this be 
the case? Death is the dissolution of the physical body. 
Why should the sloughing off of this earthly embodiment 
have the effect to produce immediate fixity of character ? 
On no theory but that of extreme asceticism could perfec- 
tion be explained by escape from the body, but that expla- 
nation would not, of course, be applicable to the wicked, 
for whom death is said to mean immediate and irremedi- 
able badness. The theory seems magical and unnatural. 
It must be maintained, I think, not on any rational or 
ethical ground, but on the supposition that God has re- 
vealed that it will be so. All would probably agree that 
whatever grounds can be alleged for it, must be of the 
nature of naked authority. From this point of view a 
good many unwarranted assumptions have been made, on 
both sides, regarding the nature, scope, and purpose of 
divine revelation. 

Again : What view of our question would seem to be 
required by the idea of the universality or absoluteness of 
Christianity ? Does God seriously wish that all men be 
‘saved and come to the knowledge of the truth?? Of 

course it has been widely held that he does not. He has 
chosen and determined, we are told, that all men shall not 
be saved, and has from eternity foreordained a portion of 


1 Letter to Evodius, No. CLXIV, in the American ed. of the Prole- 
“gomena, Confessions, and Letters. The principal argument is that the 
reference of the preaching in question to the world of the dead would 
$ tend to weaken the motive to the propagation of the gospel in this world. 
_ 21 Tim. ii. 4, és (eds) wavras dvOpwrous Geet cwHHvat, K.T.d. 

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522. CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


mankind to everlasting damnation “to the praise of his 
glorious justice.”1 But if we say, with the passage just 
cited, that in good faith God desires that all men be saved 
the question then arises whether the grace of God that 
brings salvation is actually, in this world, brought practi- 
cally and effectively within the reach of all. Have all the: 
inhabitants of earth enjoyed in their lifetime here—sg 
far as we can judge —an adequate opportunity to embrace 
the truth as revealed in Jesus Christ? In other words: 
Is it true that salvation is through Christ only? Does 
that mean that men must, in order to be saved, have some 
knowledge of him and believingly accept him? If so, do 
men generally have any adequate opportunity to do this 


ment have been able to maintain steadfastly the scriptural 
teaching that there is no way of salvation but through 
personal faith in Christ ; their opponents have had the 
alternative, on the one hand, of abandoning it and substi- 
tuting for salvation through Christ salvation through the 
light of nature and conscience, or, on the other hand, 
believing and teaching that the unnumbered millions of 
mankind who have never heard of Christ have been 
eternally lost. It is creditable to men of this class that 
most of them have adopted the former view, in spite of 
the fact that it is a departure from traditional orthodoxy.” 

The fact that Christ is uniformly represented in the 


1 Westminster Confession, ch. ili. 7. 

2 The traditional view is this: ‘‘ The light of nature and the works of 
creation and providence are not sufficient to give that knowledge of God 
and of his will which is necessary unto salvation.’? Westminster Confes- 
sion, ch. i. ‘* Much less can men not professing the Christian religion be 
saved in any other way whatsoever, be they never so diligent to frame 
their lives according to the light of nature and the law of that religion 
they do profess ; and to assert and maintain that they may be [saved] is 
very pernicious, and to be detested.’> Ch. x. The theory which is here so 
sternly condemned, now —strangely enough — passes for orthodoxy. It 
should be noted that, whatever its merits, it is as wide a departure from 
Protestant traditionalism as is the ‘‘ larger hope.’’ 


SALVATION AND HUMAN DESTINY 523 


New Testament as the final Judge of men would seem to 
imply that all men are to be judged at last by the specific 
tests of his truth and gospel, and how could this be apart 
from personal relation to him? Whether the doctrine of 
a Christian judgment necessarily implies a knowledge of 
the personal Christ on the part of all men or not, it can 
hardly imply less than such a knowledge of the truths 
which Christ represents as will constitute a decisive test 
of character. In whatever sense there is no salvation 
except in and through Christ, in that same sense there 
can be no final condemnation apart from the rejection of 
Christ. If a personal knowledge of Christ is essential 
to salvation, it must also be necessary to final condemna- 
tion. God cannot be so unjust as to accept men by the 
application of one test and reject them by the application 
of another. The traditional doctrine that the light of 
nature, apart from Christ, is sufficient to condemn men, 
but not sufficient to save them, is monstrous. 

The rival theory to that of continuous moral opportunity 
and discipline is the theory of the “essential Christ ” — 
the idea being that the truth of Christ is adumbrated in 
nature and reflected in conscience. The following of this 
light, it is said, is implicit or unconscious faith in Christ. 
It will be seen that the “essential Christ” is but another 
name for the light of nature by which the Confession 
informs us that no person can possibly be saved. I am 
far from certain of the authenticity of this information. 
It seems to me that the faith of the centurion and the 
acceptance of those who, having done loving service to 
Christ’s brethren, had really done it unwittingly unto 
him, may properly be described in the terms of this theory. 
As against the traditional orthodoxy (of which it is a 
radical transformation), the theory of the immanent and ° 
unrecognized Christ is rational and comforting. But is it 
adequate to meet our problem? Have the vast mass of 
mankind ever had such a knowledge of the motives and 
principles of Christ as may fairly constitute a decisive test 
of them? Have the unnumbered millions of men who 
have passed from conditions of deep darkness and igno- 


524 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


rance into the world beyond ever known or confronted 
here on earth the “essential Christ”; that is, have they 
ever perceived what Christ essentially is, have they ever 
discerned and contemplated the moral truths and religious 
ideals which his life and work represent and embody? 
For my part, with the fullest recognition of all the truths 
in the essential Christ theory which Scripture and obser- 
vation can attest, it seems to me clear that, respecting 
countless multitudes of men, our problem remains unalle- 
viated by that theory. The choice remains between the 
traditional view and a hope for mankind which is larger 
than this brief life. 

There is an unwarranted assumption which is commonly 
shared equally by both parties to the discussion of our 
present theme, namely, that this life is to be contemplated 
primarily as a “probation.” I suppose we must credit 
the prevalence of this conception largely to the influence 
of Butler’s Analogy. That the moral life of mankind has 
a probationary aspect, no one doubts; but that man was 
placed here primarily to determine how he would abide 
certain tests is certainly a very inadequate conception of 
the nature and purport of human life. The notion in 
question has been greatly promoted by the popular ideas 
of primitive man’s situation in paradise. He is supposed 
to have been placed there among trees bearing tempting 
fruits in order to let it be determined whether he would 
stand or fall. But human life is better conceived as a 
training school than as an inquisition. It is a discipline, 
an education, a growth. The question is not whether we 
may believe in a “second probation ” for men, but whether 
we may legitimately hope for continued opportunity for 
moral choice and progress — at any rate, in the case of 
those who have little or no such opportunity here. The 
grounds for such a hope— estimate them as one may — 
are these: (1) the goodness and equity of God; (2) the 
presumptive continuity of the future life with this; (3) the 
fact that there is no evidence, scientific or philosophical, 
that death necessarily ends moral progress or excludes 
moral change; (4) the rational and biblical considerations 





SALVATION AND HUMAN DESTINY 525 


_ favoring an intermediate state ; and (5) the explicit scrip- 
tural teaching that men are to be tested at last by their 
relation and attitude toward Christ. Whatever may be 
thought of them, these considerations are neither irrele- 
vant nor irrational, and, in my judgment, they are far 
more cogent, consistent, and satisfying than the assump- 
tions which underlie the traditional view of the subject. 

But, now, suppose one makes this venture of faith and 
adopts as probable the supposition that the grace of God 
which brings salvation is not limited in its scope to this 
little planet, what then? Can we form any legitimate 
conjecture as to what will be the issue of continued moral 
opportunity and development beyond death? The Uni- 
versalist believes that we may reasonably hope for the 
ultimate restoration of all men to holiness through the 
disciplinary chastisement of God and in the more favoring 
conditions in which we may believe men will find them- 
selves in the world to come. For many it will be enough 
to know that this is a “ heresy” repudiated in the leading 
Protestant creeds and commonly denounced in popular 
polemics. The history of the subject, however, more 
than suggests that this theory might have had a very 
different reception in the Christian world but for two 
circumstances: (1) its repudiation by Augustine and 
Jerome, and (2) the rejection by the Reformation of the 
doctrine of a middle state in every form. But, on the 
other hand, the theory in question was held by the great 
Alexandrian theologians, Clement and Origen, by the 
two Gregorys, who were among the most eminent repre- 
sentatives of ancient Greek theology, and by the two fore- 
most theologians of the School of Antioch, Diodore of 
Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia. It has been widely 
adopted by German theologians from Schleiermacher and 
Neander onward, while in England the civil courts have 
- decided that it is a permissible belief within the English 
Church, and it has been favored by such men as Maurice, 
Plumptre and Farrar. 


1See Dr. G. P. Fisher’s essay on the ‘‘History of the Doctrine of 
Future Punishment’? in Discussions in History and Theology. 


526 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


Restorationism has also its proof-texts. Christ speaks of 
drawing “all men” unto him (Jn. xii. 32). Paul makes” 
this sweeping comparison: “As in Adam all die, even so 
in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. xv. 22), and a little 
farther on speaks of a time when “all things” shall have 
been subjected unto God that he may be all in all (1 Cor. 
xv. 28). Again: God “ purposed to sum up all things in 
Christ” (Eph. i. 10), and through him to “reconcile all 
things to himself” (Col. i. 20). The apostle believes that 
“every knee shall bow and every tongue confess” the 
Lordship of Christ (Phil. ii. 10, 11). Further: God, 
who is “the Saviour of all men” (1 Tim. iv. 10), “ wills 
(0érev) that all men be saved ” (1 Tim. ii. 4), and his “ grace: 
has appeared bringing salvation to all men” (Titus ii. 11). 
It would, I think, be admitted by any unprejudiced person 
that these verses lend as plausible a support to restora- 
tionism as the texts commonly cited lend to the support 
of any current eschatological theory. 

It is common to oppose them and all arguments drawn 
from them by means of the Greek lexicon. Eternal 
punishment, it is said, means endless punishment, and 
that means an everlasting dualism of good and evil in the 
universe. Arguments from individual words, however, 
are apt to be precarious. ’Avévios means pertaining to an age 
(aiwv), or age-long. It no more means endless —neces- 
sarily —than aiev means eternity. In the New Testament 
the alwy wedXov is the contrast to the aiwv obros — the com- 
ing age of messianic blessedness, as contrasted with this” 
present, evil, ante-messianic age. In general these Greek 
words are used in much the same ways as the corresponding 
Hebrew term (n>) in the Old Testament. Sometimes 
they are used quantitatively to denote an indefinitely 
long time; in other cases they refer rather to the character 
or quality of the eternal life— notably so in the Fourth 
Gospel — and sometimes they may mean practically what 
we try to express by “eternity.” But their common use 
usually implies limitation. Let us note a few examples in 
which we will render the terms under discussion by eternal 
or eternity with a view to the question whether eternal is 





SALVATION AND HUMAN DESTINY Saf 


synonymous with endless. The covenant with Noah 
was an eternal covenant (Gen. ix. 16); Canaan was to 
be to the Israelites an eternal possession (Gen. xvii. 8); 
the Psalmist meditates upon the years of eternity (ages) 
(Ps. Ixxvii. 5); the prophets have been from eternity (a7 
aiwvos) (Acts iii. 21); God promised eternal life before 
eternal times (Titus i. 2). The terms are used sometimes 
with reference to the past, sometimes with reference to 
the future. They may mean: reaching back to an indefi- 
nite past time, or reaching forward indefinitely; or they 
may be not primarily temporal at all, but qualitative, 
emphasizing the characteristics of the coming age or of 
life in the coming age, or even in this world, so far as that 
life is shared here and now. It is eternal life to know 
God and Christ (Jn. xvii. 3); he who shares Christ’s 
Spirit (drinks his blood) has eternal life (Jn. vi. 54). 
The words rendered “ eternal” can settle the questions in 
hand only for those who have already settled them on 
other grounds. 

But if we make the supposition that repentance and con- 
version are not impossible in the world to come, can any 
reason be given for supposing that they will take place? 
We must answer: We can no more prove this than any 
one can prove the contrary. What, then, is the proba- 
bility? Does not character tend to fixity and is it not 
likely that men will persist forever in the characters which 
they acquire here? As to that, character tends to fixity 
here ; yet many men, long confirmed in an evil life, do re- 
pent and turn to God. Perhaps, too, some new light will 
dawn, in the future world, on the darkened and rebellious 
minds of men ; perhaps conditions will be more favorable 
to goodness in the life tocome. What will be the concrete 
issues of a life or state with whose conditions we are not 
acquainted, I leave it for others to say. All that I am 
concerned to maintain is that there is no proof that God’s 
grace and Christian salvation are no larger in their scope 
or possibility than this little life. On the contrary, it 
seems to me more congruous with the character of God to 
suppose that his laws and methods are essentially the same 


528 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


in all worlds, and that he will never shut the door of merey 
against any repentant soul. Now whether all men, or many 
men, or some men, or no men at all, will repent in the com- 
ing age, we cannot know. But we are at liberty to hope 
that some, or many, or all, may, or even will, doso. It is 
not wicked to hope, and I, for one, refuse to be debarred 
from this right and privilege. Of one thing I am sure: 
No man has any information to the effect that death nec- 
essarily marks the boundary of the day of grace for man- 
kind. I therefore exercise the liberty of hoping and 
believing that it does not. Beyond that I can only say this: 
All the moral arguments which are used to prove ever- 
lasting punishment justify equally belief in the possibility 
of recovery to holiness. If you say: Evil character tends 
to permanence, I answer: Yes, but in this life that perma- 
nence is relative, not absolute ; who would assert that all 
sinners are absolutely bad and irrecoverable at their death ? 
If you say : Punishment must last while sin is persisted 
in, Lanswer: Certainly, but no longer. If you say: There 
can be no unholy blessedness, I reply : Certainly not, but 
for the same reasons, there can be no condemned penitence. 
If you say: Punishment must be unending if sin is un- 
ending, I can only add that if, then, sin should cease, be 
repented of, and forsaken, of course penalty would cease. 
The point is: Can it be established by evidence that the 
sin of all who die unrepentant here will be persistent and 
unending? If it can, I have never met with the proof. 
It is a question, as Professor James would say, of the will 
to believe or not to believe — whether the choice under 
consideration is a “living option.” Therefore, let him be- 
lieve that death necessarily ends moral opportunity who 
can, or will; in the existing dearth of information and 
evidence, I will not. 





CHAPTER XV 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 


IF it shall appear to any that the foregoing discussion 
has been unduly critical and has occupied itself too largely 
with stating and estimating the views of others, I would 
say, in explanation, that it has seemed to me necessary to 
the proper presentation of our subject and in order to form 
a just judgment on controverted points, to review its his- 
tory, and even in our constructive efforts to keep the prin- 
ciples of the different theories constantly before us. It 
appears to me that there is no respect in which treatises 
on atonement are more generally defective than this, that 
they do not furnish their readers any clear account of the 
points of likeness and difference among theories and relate 
themselves definitely to the principles of some particular 
type of explanation. It cannot be assumed that most 
readers have made a first-hand study of the history of the 
doctrine. That being the case, if a writer, in addition to 
being indefinite or non-committal on points of chief inter- 
est and difficulty, also neglects to explain what these points 
are and how the historic theories have viewed and treated 
them, he is more likely to confuse than to illumine the 
minds of his readers. I have been very desirous not to 
fail in either of these essential particulars. I venture to 
hope that, whatever may be thought of my own personal 
views, the reader of this book will be somewhat helped to 
make his choice among theories. I have sought to show 
that each type of explanation has its own concept of God 
underlying it and that the choice of a theory must be based 
upon a corresponding conception of his nature and action. 
I have desired to exhibit, clearly and candidly, these various 
concepts of God. If it be thought by any one that I have 
in any case misconceived or misstated them, I can only urge 

529 


530 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


that my interpretations and judgments be carefully tested 
by the somewhat numerous citations of opinions which 
I have reproduced from the representatives of the various 
theories. 

I have designed to emphasize and illustrate the impor- 
tance of studying theological subjects in the light of their 
history. And by their history I do not mean merely the 
bare fact that this or that was said by one or another. 
The history of a doctrine includes the appreciation of the 
atmosphere or thought-world in which a given theory had 
its rise, motive, and development. Much historical labor 
fails to lead to any just or helpful result because the ideas 
and theories of antiquity or of the Middle Age are not 
seen in historical perspective, but are viewed and judged 
by the standards and measures of our own thought and 
life. In this way new meanings come to be attached to 
old terms, the real characteristics of earlier theories are 
obscured, and much confusion and misunderstanding 
result. But when each successive type of explanation is 
studied in the light of its own time, and its presupposi- 
tions and principles are clearly defined and estimated, then 
the student has the means for making a clear and intelli- 
gent choice among the more or less divergent theories. 
Fortunately for our purpose, there is no Christian doc- 
trine which has had a more definite and traceable history 
than the doctrine of atonement. While some theories are 
more clear-cut than others, and, within a given type, the 
divergences are often very difficult to define, still the lines 


only can, but must, make a choice among them. While I 
have labored conscientiously to make my own personal 
opinions as plain as possible, it has been my main endeavor 
to supply the reader with the means of choosing and 
deciding the question among theories for himself. If, 
after carefully reviewing the whole subject, some may 
still prefer Anselm’s theory, others that of Grotius, and 
still others that of Dr. Shedd, I will not disguise my 





SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS Soll 


regret ; but I should regret far more deeply my failure — 

_ if I have failed —to clarify the points in dispute and to 
make it apparent among what fundamental views of God 

and of man the choice is to be made. 

The studies which have resulted in the preparation of 

_ this volume have convinced me that the ultimate choice 
among theories of atonement reduces, at last, to the alter- 
native between the penal satisfaction and the moral theory. 
Other theories are either elaborations of some anthropo- 
mo rphic figure, or mediating and incongruous combina- 
tions, whose plausibility consists chiefly in “their yagueness. 
The penal and the ethical views alone are definite and 
consistent. The former is based in a thoroughgoing dual- 
ism, which introduces division and antagonism everywhere 
—first and chiefly into the nature of God himself; the 
latter is based on the divine unity and love. Historically 
considered, the penal theory is kindred to the theology of 
late Jewish legalism, while the ethical view is deduced 
from Jesus’ conception of the divine fatherhood. In the 
former, atonement is a precondition of salvation; in the 
latter, it is a name for the actual work of saving men. 
According to the former, the first work of Christ is to 
save God himself from inner discord by averting war 
among his attributes; according to the latter, he came to 
rescue the sinful sons of men to the Father’s house and 
the Father’s fellowship. Between these forever irrecon- 
cilable _theories, based in radically different conceptions 
of God, lies the choice. Variations from both are, of 
course, possible, and there have been many intermediate 
positions, but they are hazy and inconsistent, because they 
rest on no well-defined principle. They try to find a 
standing-ground between dualism and a genuinely ethical 
monism, or to combine them. They aim to graft the ethi- 
cism of Jesus upon Pharisaic deism and heathen anthropo- 
morphism. This cannot be successfully done. The choice 
should be frankly made between them. 

It is no part of my intention to enter, in these closing 

remarks, into any further efforts to elucidate or justify 
the methods and conclusions which are embodied in this 


532 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


volume. My only object is to state as concisely as possible 
what these conclusions are, and thus to make as clear as 
I am able the answers which I would give to questions 
which thoughtful students of the subject are certain to 
ask. If the foreeos investigation and aes 2: have 
of Christ — the interpretation which construes it in terms” 
of personal relationship and influence —is the truest and 
most satisfactory conception which we are able to form of 
his mission, life-work, and passion, it is too late for me to 
do anything toward convincing him. I will merely add, 
in this connection, that I should like to commend to any 
who may be interested to read further on the lines of this 
book, two clear and forceful presentations of the theory 
which I have advocated here: (1) a concise exposition 
of it in the relevant section of Dr. W. N. Clarke’s Outline 
of Christian Theology (pp. 308-362); and (2) a more 
elaborate statement and defence of it in Dr. T. Y. 
Tymms’s The Christian Idea of Atonement. 

Not infrequently treatises on our subject give the im- 
pression of being clear on certain very general or formal 
principles, but of failing entirely to meet the specific ques- 
tions on which one most needs and desires light. For 
example, there may be a constant assertion and mainten-_ 
ance of the principle that in the work of Christ God must 
and does manifest and vindicate his righteousness, while 
no effort is made to answer the questions: What zs God’s 
righteousness? and in what way or by precisely what 
means does Christ vindicate it? Too much must not be 
demanded of efforts to expound a great and mysterious 
subject, but readers have a fair right to expect that the 
most crucial points shall not be slurred over or evaded. 
In the hope of making my own views as clear as possible, 
I accordingly undertake to reproduce here, not indeed 
the substance of the argument hitherto developed, but the 
gist of my conclusions. 

(1) Righteousness includes both “ the goodness and the 
severity of God,” that is, it embraces at once the gracious, 


1 Macmillan, 1904, 








SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 533 


self-imparting impulse and the self-respecting, self-affirm- 
ing principle in God. It is the justice of God to his own 
nature; it embraces’ equally his benevolence and his 
purity ; it is holy love. It is in this sense of the word, 
therefore, that we are to find an exhibition of God’s right- 
eousness in the work of Christ. To define righteousness 
in the narrow sense of retributive justice, the impulse and 
necessity to punish, is radically unscriptural and involves 
a series of inferences and corollaries which are incongru- 
ous with the Christian concept of God. 

(2) Christ reveals and _ satisfies, not some single attri- 
bute of God arbitrarily defined and separated ‘from his 
total moral perfection, but God himself in his saving, holy 
leve. His passion is the consummate revelation ae the 
divine love because it shows what love is willing to do, 
and what it is its very nature to do, in order to save. It 
reveals what sin is, since it Shows how a sinful world 
treats perfect love. The passion of Christ thus exhibits 
the sinfulness of the world on the background of perfect 
holiness. 

(3) Christ saves men by bringing them into fellowship 
with God, by enabling them to realize the life of sonship 
to God, which is t their true design and destiny, and by 
founding ¢ and fostering by the Spirit of his life among and 
in men the Kingdom of the Godlike. Salvation is prima- 
rily salvation f = sin, and in salvation from sin salvation 
Fors penalty is implicit. Christ saves men from sin by 
saying them toholiness. To represent the death of Christ 
as a device whose primary intention is to provide an es- 
cape from penalty, is to adopt too negative a conception of 
salvation and to lay the chief stress upon a subordinate 
aspect of it. 

(4) The grace of God is absolute and free, and from it 
flow redemption and forgiveness. Hence the death of 
Christ is not the ground of forgiveness, or the fountain 
of mercy, but its outcome and expression. In our Lord’s 
life, labors, and sufferings we behold, not the cause, but the 
method of grace. Therefore it is not correct to say that 
_ Christ procured for men the pardon of their sins by in- 





584 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


fluencing the mind of God in their favor, and so inducing 
him to forgive. Christ lived, labored, suffered, and died, 
not to make God willing to save, but to show how willing 
he is and to make his eternal willingness effective — really 
to accomplish what God, in his holy love, desires to do. 

(5) Christ atones for sin in the sense of judging, con- 
demning, and abolishing it. He is substituted for men in 
the sense in which perfect love takes the place and bears 
the burdens of its objects. He gives the ransom which 
love always pays in its vicarious deyotion. But this is no 
mere transactional procedure done outside of us. We 
must enter into its meaning and make it our very own. 
We must die with Christ in self-giving if we would rise 
and walk with him in newness of life. His work avails 
for us by our appropriation of his Spirit and by the realiza- 
tion of his law of life within us. a 

(6) The sinner in his sins can see in God only the 
wrathful Judge. Christ enables him to contemplate him 
in his mercy and pity. He reveals to sinful man the fact 
that, while God hates his sin, he loves him; he convinces 
sinners that, while God condemns their sin, he also loves 
and is ready to forgive them. Thus he reconciles men to 
God and transforms him, for their consciousness, from the 
angry God whom alone the sinful conscience can see, into 
the God of love whom repentance and faith embrace. 
Jesus Christ secures for us the forgiveness of sins and the 
favor of God by enabling us to see and know God as he 
truly is—at once holy and gracious. He moves us toa 
repentance and faith which change for us the face of God. 
We are enabled to see and acknowledge the Lamb in the 
midst of God’s throne — the love that is at the heart of 
his power and sovereignty. 

(7) Christ’s whole aim was to induce men to desire 
and accept pardon. His death created no new fact in God. 
His mission was to incite mankind to faith in the infinite 





love of God. When men thus see Christ in love bearing — 


the burdens of their sin in his profound sympathy and 
suffering, how can they help hating their sin? They must 
see that God will save at whatever cost of suffering. 


a 


a —  ————— 



















SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 535 


(8) Here emerges the truth of “eternal atonement.” 
i the work of Christ we behold a transcript of the eternal 
‘passion of the heart of God on account of sin. Over 
‘against the sin which pierces the Saviour’s heart we see 
the holy love which will not abandon us and let us be lost 
‘to itself. At the cross we see the justice which justifies 
and saves, but which saves only by condemning sin and by 
rescuing us from sin to holiness. Salvation is no mere 
acquittal, a letting-go or remission ; it is a recovery to God- 
likeness, to Holiness, and all that Christ does to save us is 
an assertion and maintenance of the standard of holiness. 
_ Apart from the divine ideal of holiness salvation can have 
no proper meaning. 

_ (9) The work of Christ is not a mere provision for 
‘man’s salvation, or a condition precedent, but an actual 
work of salvation, a real moral recovery of men from sin to 
goodness. The primary fact_is that Christ saves us from 
alienation from God into fellowship with him. He lived, 
labored, suffered, and died, that we might not live the 
isolated and selfish life —that he oe deliver us from 
the present evil world, purge our consciences from dead 
works, and redeem us from every vain manner of life. 
Christ saves us by taking us into the fellowship of his own 
life of perfect love and sacrifice and by introducing us 
into a sonship to God like his own. 

(40) Christ perfectly fulfilled the life of sonship to God ; 
and the progressive realization of the same sonship and 
‘of human brotherhood by humanity, in the Spirit of Christ, 
is the atonement —the reconciliation of man with God. 
he object of all that Christ did and experienced was to 
make men one with God. His work proceeded upon the 
assumption that God and man were not essentially alien, 
but kindred, natures,—despite the moral separation 
eaused by sin,—and this kinship makes the atonement 
possible. Reconciliation is the fulfilment of the divine 
idea of man. Man can come to himself only as he comes 
to God in free obedience and love. This recovery of man 
alone can satisfy God. It is God’s nature to seek and to 
save ; for him to do that is not to be doing something 


















536 CONSTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DOCTRINE 


extraordinary, peculiar, and special; it is not an excep- 
tional, but a natural, procedure. Hence atonement is a per- 
petual, eternal work of God. The atoning work of Christ 
is the production of the consciousness and experience 
of sonship in mankind. In the cross we see consum- 
mately revealed what we see in Christ always and every- 
where — the perfection of his divine obedience and charity, 
his submissive endurance of hatred and suffering that he 
might complete the work of love and bring the sinful 
world to the feet of God. The atonement is a continuous 
and progressive work. Men are dying with Christ and 
rising with him still, filling up that, which i is behind of 
repeating in themselves his life of sacrifice. To do this 
is salvation. 

As I lay down my task, I should like to appropriate 
the words with which Auguste Sabatier closed the book 
with which he ended his life-work: ‘‘ He who writes these 
lines knows better than any other that his long and diffi- 
cult enterprise is only a preliminary essay. If he does 
all that in him lies to bind up his sheaf, it is that he may 
give to others an idea of the fertility of the field in which 
he has labored, and thus attract to it new laborers 
stronger and more able than himself. Never for a moment 
does he shut his eyes to the fact that his sheaf, so pain- 
fully and perhaps prematurely bound, must be unbound 
again to receive, perhaps ears grown at an earlier day and 
which he ought not to have overlooked, and surely ears 
of a new harvest not yet come to maturity.” 


1 Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit, p. 378. 





GENERAL INDEX 


Abbott, T. K., 314. 

Abelard, on atonement, 140. 

Acceptatio, 161, 189. 

Adamson, A., 124. 

Anselm, on atonement, 136 sq., 164, 
240 sq.; his theory of penalty, 322, 
414, 416, 430. 

Antioch, School of, 525. 

Arminian views of atonement, 171 sq. 

Athanasius, 237. 

Atonement, Day of, 83, 85; eternal, 
433 sq. 

Augustine, 139, 140, 221, 254, 281, 317, 
428, 429, 521, 525. 

Azazel, 11. 


Babut, H., 45. 

Bahr, Karl, 5. 

Baptist, John the, 94. 

Barnabas, Epistle of, 137. 

Bartlet, J. V., 32. 

Baur, F. C., 74. 

Beck, J. T., 186. 

Bellamy, Joseph, 172, 202. 

Benevolence, the divine, according to 
Grotius, 169. 

Berkeley, Bishop, 172. 

Bernard of Clairvaux, 140. 

Beyschlag, W., 70, 110, 274. 

Bible and Church, 498 sq. 

Bleek, F., 130. 

Blood of Christ, 107 sq., 406. 

Bousset, W., 59. 

Bouvier, A., 227-229. 

Bowne, B. P., 238, 260, 392, 393. 

Bradley, F. H., 461. 

Bread of life, 98 sq. 

Brooks, Phillips, 238. 

Brown, W. A., 20, 27. 

Browning, Robert, 458. 

Bruce, A. B., 23, 69, 70, 127, 285. 

Bushnell, Horace, 218, 234-237, 258, 
259, 353, 373, 436, 444, 445, 466, 486. 

Butler, Bishop, 524. 


Caird, John, 231, 232. 
Calvin, John, 140, 154, 198, 252, 428, 429. 





Campbell, J. McLeod, 153, 191, 197, 
201, 207, 211-214, 237. 

Candlish, J. S., 242, 243, 284. 

Carruth, W. H., 427. 

Catholic theory of justification, 452 sq. 

Character, the Christian, 470 sq. 

Charles, R. C., 310. 

Chastisement, in contrast to punish- 
ment, 324 sq. 

Chauncy, Charles, 172. 

Christ’s relation to mankind, 357 sq.; 
his death on our behalf, 381 sq.; 
union of humility and kingliness in, 
508. 

Church and Kingdom, 503 sq. ; aim and 
function of, 506, 507. 

Clarke, Samuel, 172. 

Clarke, W. N., 237, 238, 338, 356, 437, 
532. 

Clement of Alexandria, 137. 

Clement of Rome, 137. 

Coe, G. A., 486. 

Commercial theory of atonement, 
136 sq. 

Cone, Orello, 68. 

Conversion, 483 sq. 

Cosmic Christ, in Paul, 438. 

Covenant-sacrifice, 50. 

Covenant, the New, 84 sq. 

Crawford, T. J., 187-189, 253, 352, 415. 

Cremer, H., 68. 

Cur Deus Homo, 141 sq. 

Curcelleus, 171. 

Curse, the, of the law, 63 sq. 


Dale, R. W., 51, 116, 124, 152, 156, 190, 
192, 194, 198, 323, 326 sq., 341, 342, 
385, 401, 411, 414. 

Dalman, G., 59. 

Davidson, A. B., 14,17, 18, 22, 248, 249. 

Death of Christ, significance of, 41 sq. ; 
in Paul, 68 sq.; in Hebrews, 78 sq.; 
in John, 94 sq.; summary of N. T. 
teaching concerning, 115 sq.; penal 
view of, 152 sqy.; on our behalf, 381 
sq.; why necessary, 396 sq. 

Deissmann, G. A., 61, 109. 


5387 


538 


Denney, James, 51, 68, 70, 77, 88, 104, 
194-197, 240, 241, 357, 358, 399, 411. 

Depravity, total, 315. 

Destiny, problems concerning, 509 sq. 

De Wette, W. M. L., 130. 

Dillmann, August, 13, 14, 279. 

Diognetus, Epistle to, 137. 

Divinity of Christ, 297 sq. 

Dogma, 472 sq. 

Dorner, I. A., 153, 282. 

Drummond, R. J., 45. 

Duns Scotus, 161, 171, 243. 

Diisterdieck, F., 130. 

Dwight, Timothy, 285, 286. 


Ecclesia, 504, 505. 

Edwards, Jonathan, Jr., 172, 202, 203. 

Edwards, Jonathan, Sr., 172, 199-201, 
206, 212, 216, 316, 414, 418, 421, 482, 
488. 

Election, Israel’s, 23. 

Emmons, Nathaniel, 202. 

Essential Christ, 523. 

Eternal atonement, 433 sq. 

“Eternal,” biblical use of, 526, 527. 

Ewald, Heinrich, 130. 


Fairbairn, A. M., 6, 218, 219, 435, 436. 

Faith, in the prophetic teaching, 29, 
30; in Hebrews, 89, 90; 451 sq. 

Fall, the, 308 sq. 

Fatherhood of God, 264 sq. 

Fathers, the Church, on atonement, 
137. 

Feine, P., 45. 

Fisher, G. P., 136, 222, 525. 

Forgiveness of sins, 49, 52, 340 sq.; the 
ground of, 285, 385. 

Forrest, D. W., 193, 194, 385. 

Foster, F. H., 162, 165, 171, 172. 

Frank, F. H. R., 197. 

Frazer, J. G., 5. 


Garvie, A. E., 225 

Gerhard, J., 155. 

Gess, W. F., 197. 

Giesebrecht, F., 33. 

God, Christian concept of, 262 sq. 

Gordon, G. A., 238. 

Government, the divine, in the theory 
of Grotius, 166 sq. 

Governmental theory of atonement, 
157 sq.; ethicized forms of, 198 sq. 
Grace of God, 174 sq., 265, 272, 277, 

281. 
Grafe, E., 50. 





GENERAL INDEX 


Granger, Frank, 453, 486. 

Gregory of Nyssa, 138. 

Gregory the Great, 138, 139. 

Grotius on Satisfaction for Sin, 157 
8q.; critique of, 252 sq.; his theory 
of penalty, 322; 414, 417. 


Haring, T., 197. 

Harris, George, 207-209, 353, 

Harris, Samuel, 203, 204, 286. 

Hatch, Edwin, 474. 

Haupt, Erich, 50. 

Hebrews, the Epistle to the, doctrine 
of salvation in, 76 sq.; the rep- 
resentative humanity of Christ in, 
372 sq. 

Hengstenberg, E. W., 186. 

Hitchcock, R. D., 130, 218, 437. 

Hodge, Charles, 179, 181-186, 188, 189, 
253, 323, 352, 375, 415. 


‘| Hoffmann, R. A., 45, 50, 51. 


Hofmann, J. C. K. von, 224. 

Holiness of God, penal view of, 174 
sq.; biblical view of, 278 sq.; how — 
manifested in the work of Christ, 
388 sq. 

Hollmann, G., 42, 45, 46. 

Holtzmann, H. J., 7, 14, 45, 50, 55, 68, 
69, 70, 71, 77, 84, 89, 96, 104, 131, 132. 

Holtzmann, O., 94. 

Hopkins, Samuel, 172, 202, 204. 

Hort, F. J. A., 505. 

Hugo of St. Victor, 123. 

Hume, R. A., 487. 

Hutcheson, J. T., 217. 


Ignatius, 137. 

Incarnation, whether independent of 
the fact of sin, 357 sq. 

Individualism, in the prophets, 25 sq. 

Infants, salvation of, 514. 

Intercession, 440 sq. 

Intermediate state, 509, 520. 

Immortality, in Old Testament, 25, 26; 
“conditional,” 511 sq. 

Imputation of faith, 456. 

Ireneus, 138, 139. 


James, Epistle of, on justification, 454. 

Jerome, 525. 

Jesus, his teaching concerning salvya- 
tion, 35 sq.; example of, 41; death — 
of, 41 sq., 55-57, 115-118 ; personality 
of, 287 sq.; New Testament deserip- — 
tions of, 295, 298-301. See also 
Christ. ' 





GENERAL INDEX 


Jevons, F. B., 5. 

Jewish theories of sin, 309 sq., 399. 

Johannine teaching concerning salva- 
tion, 93 sq. 

Jones-Griffith, E., 217. 

Jowett, Benjamin, 232, 233, 342. 

Judgment, final, 517, 518. 

Jiilicher, Adolf, 50. 

Justice, rectoral, 164; distributive, 175. 

Justification, 341, 347, 451 sq. 

Justin Martyr, 137. 


Kaftan, J., 186, 282. 
Kihler, M., 197. 
Kapporeth, 61-63. 
Kautsch, E., 33, 122. 
King, H. C., 238, 391, 392. 
Kingdom of God, 492 sq. 


Lamb of God, 94 sq. 

Law, the divine, according to Grotius, 
166 sq. 

Laying on of hands, significance of, 
9-12. 

Lidgett, J. S., 136, 152, 190, 210, 211, 
216, 334, 414, 423 sq. 

Life, the giving of, in John, 100 sq. 

Lightfoot, John, 100. 

Lipsius, R. A., 70, 282, 283, 409. 

Logos, 360, 439. 

Love, place of in penal satisfactionism, 
174 sq.; in modern theology, 282; 
the essence of virtue, 313; 475 sq. 

Luther, 156, 252. 

Lyttelton, Arthur, 209, 210, 422, 423. 


Mackintosh, Robert, 267, 268, 355. 

Magee, Archbishop, 188. 

Mankind, Christ’s relation to, 357 sq. 

Mastricht, P. van, 155. 

Mather, Nathaniel, 501. 

Matthes, J. C., 13. 

Maurice, F. D., 5, 230, 231, 330, 411. 

McGiffert, A. C., 68. 

Melanchthon, 155, 180. 

Melchizedek, 81, 82. 

Ménégoz, E., 68, 70, 76, 77, 141, 186. 

Meyer, H. A. W.., 95, 274, 314. 

Milligan, George, 87. 

Moberly, R. C., 136, 190, 214-216, 233, 
240, 241, 242, 257, 337, 351. 

Moore, G. F., 4, 13. 

Moral theory of atonement, 221 sq., 
390 sq., 400 sq. 

Morison, James, 274, 430. 

Morris, J., 318. 





539 


Mulford, Elisha, 237. 

Miller, Julius, 282, 313. 

Munger, T. T., 237, 238. 

Mysticism, the Pauline, 69 sq., 370 Sq, 
metaphysical, 461. 


Natural man, the, 488. 

Necessity of Christ’s death, according 
to Anselm, 149 sq. 

Nitzsch, C. I., 223, 282. 

Nitzsch, F. A. B., 186, 197, 224, 282. 


“Objective’’ and ‘“ subjective’’ theo- 
ries, 256-260, 425. 

Old Testament in relation to the New, 
1-3. 

Oosterzee, J. J. Van, 282. 

Origen, 138, 139. 

Orr, James, 191, 192, 197, 358, 359. 

Oxenham, H. N., 137, 237. 


Park, BE. A., 172, 202, 2038. 

Pascal, Blaise, 301. 

Passover, relation of Lord’s Supper 
to, 50. 

Paterson, W. P., 16. 

Patrick, Bishop, 171. 

Patripassianism, 218. 

Patristic view of atonement, 137 sq. 

Paul, his doctrine of salvation, 54 sq.; 
his legalism, 66; his doctrine of sin, 
311 sq. 

Paulsen, F., 257. 

Penal theory of atonement, 174 sq.; 
modified forms of, 190 sqg.; eriti- 
cism of, 244 sq.; its connection with 
a theory of punishment, 338; 427 sq. 

Penitence, in relation to forgiveness, 
349 sq.; its relation to Christ’s work, 
354. 

Peter Lombard, 138, 140. 

Pfleiderer, Otto, 62, 68, 70, 270, 318. 

Philippi, F. A., 186. 

Philo, 77, 81, 125. 

Porter, F. C., 221, 310. 

Post-Reformation doctrine of penal 
satisfaction, 154-156, 251. 

Priesthood of Christ, in Hebrews, 
80 sq.; 438, 439. 

Primitive Christian view of salvation, 
54-58. 

Probation, future, 513, 514, 516, 519 sq. 

Prodigal Son, Parable of, 344. 

Prophetic doctrine of salvation, 17 sq. 

Propitiation, 61 sq., 76; in John, 108- 
110; 425. 


540 


Punishment, theories of, 322 sq. 
Purgatory, doctrine of, 509, 520. 


Quasi-penal theories of atonement, 
387 sq. 
Quenstedt, J. A., 155. 


Racovian Catechism, 157. 

Ransom, 45 sq. 

Rashdall, H., 216. 

Reconciliation, 59 sq., 123. 

Reformatory theory of penalty, 333 sq. 

Reformers’ theory of atonement, 151 
Sq-, 159 sq., 244 sq. 

Regeneration in the prophets, 31. 

Restorationism, 526. 

Resurrection, saving import of, 66, 67. 

Retributive theory of punishment, 323 
sqg.; criticism of, 330 sq. 

Retroactive effect of atonement, 379. 

Righteousness, in the prophets, 20-22; 
Pauline idea of, 60 sqg.; penal defini- 
tion of, 174 sg.; biblical doctrine of, 
270 sq., 284, 476; relation of faith to, 
467 sq. 

Ritschl, A., 5, 60, 152, 153, 161, 179, 
184, 222, 224-297, 252, 274, 493, 494. 

Robertson, F. W., 238. 

Robinson, E. G., 176. 

Robinson, J. Armitage, 315. 

Ropes, J. H., 271, 272, 274. 

Rothe, Richard, 223, 224, 237. 


Sabatier, A., 229, 230, 247, 274, 302, 
536. 

Sacrifices, theories concerning, 3-7; 
import of, 14-16; prophets’ attitude 
toward, 17, 18; as interpreted in 
Hebrews, 81 sqg.; in the Old Testa- 
ment, 377 sq. 

Sanctification, Jesus’, of himself, 102- 
105. 

Sartorius, E., 282. 

Satan, ransom paid to, 124, 138. 

Satisfaction, penal, theory of atone- 
ment, 174 sqg.; ethical theories of, 
198 sqg.; of God in Christ’s work, 
414 sq.; penal view of, 415; An- 
selm’s theory of, 416; Grotius’s 
view, 417; Edwards on, 418 sq.; 
Lyttelton on, 422; Lidgett on, 423; 
in self-sacrifice, 426. 

Schleiermacher, 222. 

Schmiedel, P. W., 132-135. 

Schultz, H., 4, 8, 12, 272. 

Schiirer, Emil, 56. 


GENERAL INDEX 








Selfishness the essence of sin, 313. 

Servant of Yahweh, 32-34, 57. 

Shedd, W. G. T., 73, 174-178, 198, 247, 
328, 324, 331, 336, 414, 415, 443, 447, 
448. 

Sheldon, H. C., 219, 220, 258, 259. 

Sheol, 520. 

Simcox, W. H., 130. 

Simon, D. W., 124, 189, 192, 224. 

Sin, 267 sqg., 290, 304 sq., 317 sq.; 
forgiveness of, 340 sq.: relation of, 
to incarnation, 357 sg.; Christ’s 
relation to, 377 sq. 

Sinless holiness of Jesus, 67, 288 sq. 

Sin-offering, 83. 

Skinner, John, 22, 278. 

Smalley, John, 202. 

Smeaton, George, 187-189, 352. 

Smend, R., 5, 15, 16. 

Smith, G. A., 18, 122, 123. 

Smith, W. R., 2, 5, 11, 20. 

Socinus, Lelius and Faustus, 157; 
their theory of salvation, 157 sq. 

Soden, H. von, 314. 

Somerville, David, 259, 299. 

Son of Man, 367. 

Spencer, Herbert, 4. 

Spitta, F., 50. 

Starbuck, E. D., 486. 

Stearns, L. F., 204-206. 

Strong, A. H., 73, 151, 178-180, 198, 
248, 272, 280, 281, 323, 324, 336, 411, 
435, 446, 476, 477, 514. 

‘“‘Subjective”’ theories of atonement, 
221 sq.; 256-260. 

Substitutionary theory of sacrifice, 5 
sq.; criticism of, 12-14; kindred 
theory of Christ’s death, 68 sq., 174 
sq., 244 sq. 

Suffering vicarious, in the prophets, 
32 sq.; in the New Testament, 59, 
122. 


Supper, the Lord’s, 48 sq. 






4% 
Taylor, John, 172. 
Tennant, F. R., 131, 307, 309, 310, 314, 
318, 399. 
Terry, M. S., 110. 
Tertullian, 138, 484. 
Thomas Aquinas, 151. 
Thomasius, G., 180, 197. 
Tiele, C. P., 5. 
Titius, A., 268. 
Trinity, 185. 
Trumbull, H. C., 15. 
Turretin, F., 155, 198. 


GENERAL INDEX 541 







Tylor, E. B., 4. Weber, F., 59. 
Tymms, T. V., 238, 270, 381, 401, 423, | Weiss, B., 100, 274, 314, 315. 
430, 449, 512, 532. Weizsiicker, C., 70, 130. 
Wendt, H. H., 100, 140. 
Union with Christ, 370 sq.; 431 sq. | Wernle, P., 66. 


West, Stephen, 202. 
Westcott, B. F., 100, 358. 
Vaucher, E., 186, 187. Westminster Catechism, 315. 


Vicarious repentance, 211-216. Westminster Confession, 251, 456, 510, 
Vinet, A., 227. 599. 


Volz, Paul, 7. Weymouth, R. F., 313. 
Whitby, Daniel, 172. 

Walker, W. L., 42, 216-218. Whitefield, George, 245, 246. 

Ward, W. H., 62. Wild, H. L., 49, 95. 

Warfield, B. B., 197, 268, 322. Wilson, Archdeacon, 238, 489. 


Watson, Richard, 172. Wrath of God, 59, 64; 274 sq. 


INDEX OF TEXTS 


Genesis: Deuteronomy : Psalms: 
ii. 17 309] xxi. 23 63|  exv.17 25 
iii. 309| xxiv. 16 162|  exliii. 1 22 
iii. 3 309] xxiv. 17 271| exliii. 1, 2 476 
iii. 19 310| xxx. 1-10 29 
vi. 1-6 310| xxxiv. 9 12 | Ecclesiastes : 
vi. 24 cl xi. 3 516 
ix. 16 527 | Judges: 
xiv. 18-20 81 vi. 22, 23 5 | Isaiah: 
xvii. 8 527| xiii. 22 5| itt 17 
xxxii. 30 5 i. 11-18 29 
xlviii. 14 12) 1 Samuel: Tec) 21, 271 
iv. 3 19| viii. 17 30 
Exodus: x. 19 19} xi.4 20, 271 
xiii. 2 103| xii. 7 972| xii. 2 20 
Xxiv. 50} xv. 22 18, 30| xix. 24, 25 23 
xxiv. 8 49, 84 XXivV-XXxVii. 25 
wa 2 Samuel: xxv. 8 25 
Leuitious: xy. 8 5| xxvi. 19 25 
whe 9 xxxy. 1 23 
iii. 8 9| Nehemiah: xlii. 6 32 
iii. 13 9] ix.3 271| xiii, 25 27, 30 
iv. 4 9 xliv. 22 27 
iv. 15 9] Psalms: xly. 21 21, 270, 476 
v. 11-13 13) ii. 16 29| xlix. 6 23, 32 
viii. 14 20) vik 5 25| ii. 13-15 33 
x. 17 12) x18 271| ii. 134iii. 12 32, 122 
xiv. 7 11, 85) xxii. 1 51| ii. 15 34 
xiv. 53 11} xxii. 4 52| iii. 52, 59, 133 
xvi. 85! xxii. 9 52| lili. 16 33 
xvi. 21 13} xxii. 19 52| lili. 7 95, 96 
xvi. 21, 22 9] xxxvi. 6 271, 476| iii. 7-12 33 
xvi. 27 86) 51.6 18,29} iii. 10 34 
xx. 10 378) xtix. 15 25) xiii. 1 476 
sacl. 26-32 8! 44.1,2 31| 1xiii. 9 442 
xxiv. 14 12! 44. 10-12 31 
: li. 14 22, 476 | Jeremiah: 
pee 19| 36 18| vii. 22, 23 18 
xv. 30 13 ris 1g 29, 378 ix. 24 22, 476 
xix. 6 85 Ixix. 5 421 p a Pur 30 
nee g5| lxxiii. 23-26 25| xiv.7 27 
XXVil. 18, 23 12 Ixxvii. 5 527 xxi. ales 16 271 
xxxv. 31 378 Ixxxii. 3 271 xxiii. 5, 6 19 
Ixxxvi. 5 430 xxvi. 13 : 30 
Deuteronomy : evi. 4, 5 19} xxxi. 18 31 
xv. 19 103 evi. 8 27 xxxi. 20 265 
xx. 24 19! cvi.7 20| xxxi. 29, 30 24 


542 





Jeremiah: 

50.0.015 Bs 20, 31 

xxxi. 34 23, 27 

XXxiii. 8 27 

xlvi. 27 19 
Lamentations: 

v.7 32 
Ezekiel: 

Xvili. 2 24 

Xviii. 4 24, 511 

Xvili. 20 25, 286 

Xviii. 21 286, 377 

XXxiii. 11 377 
Daniel: 

ix. 14 271 

xii. 2, 3 26 
Hosea: 

ii. 19 29 

vi. 1-3 25 

vi. 6 17, 478 

sa. al 23, 265 

xiii. 14 25 
Joel: 

ii. 13 29 
Amos: 

iii. 2 23, 29 

vy. 21, 22 17 

Vv. 25 18 

ix. 11-15 19 
Micah: 

vi. 8 18, 21, 31, 476 
Nahum: 

Tend 30 
Habakkuk : 

i. 13 278 

ii. 4 30 

ii. 14 23 

lil. 2 29 
Zephaniah : 

iii. 12 30 
Zechariah: 

viii. 7,8 19 

ix. 9 508 

xiii. 1 27 








INDEX OF TEXTS 


2 Maccabees: 
Vii. 38 


4 Maccabees: 
Tele 
vi. 28 
Xvii. 20-22 
Xviii. 4 


4 Ezra: 
Vili. 26 sq. 


Enoch: 
Xe 


Matthew: 


95, 


504, 


38, 
Xviil. 17 
XVili. 21, 22 
Xviil. 21-35 
xx. 28 

xxi. 5 
xxiii. 9 
XXv. 35 sq. 
XxXvi. 28 
xxvi. 64 


344, 
43, 45, 


43, 49, 


Mark: 
i. 14, 15 
i.15 
li. 20 
iv. 12 
Vili. 31 


59 











Xvii. 4 
Xviii. 13 
zo I 
xxi. 23 
5,o-altle 1s) 


xxii. 19, 20 


Xx. 32 
xxii. 69 


xxiv. 26, 27 
xxiv. 44-46 


John: 
ill 


543 


302 
49 
42 
43, 45, 101 
42 


439 
360, 439 
296, 300 

93, 297, 300 

94, 104, 134 

96 

97, 357 
498 

468 

99 

96, 98, 101 


544 


John: 
x. 18 97, 481 
x. 36 102, 103 
xi. 34 102 
xi. 48-52 97 
xi. 51, 52 100 
xi. 52 439 
xii. 23 sq. 133 
xii. 24 97, 101, 105 
xii. 25, 26 * 105 
xii. 27 sq. 106 
Reo 518, 520 
xii. 32. 96, 135, 508, 526 
xii. 33 97 
xii. 40 483 
xiii. 4 101, 102 
xiii. 12 101 
xiii. 15 93 
xiii. 31 97 
xiii. 37, 38 101 
xiii. 48 96 
xiv. 2 sq 135 
xv. 2 96 
xv. 13 97, 100 
xv. 26 135 
xvi. 7 135 
xvii. 1 133 
xvii. 2, 3 103 
xvii. 3 93, 527 
xvii. 4 103 
xvii. 5 96 
Xvii. 6 93, 103 
xvii. 8 104 
xvii. 11 268, 279 
xvii. 12 104 
xvii. 14 104 
Xvii. 17 103, 104 
xvii. 19 97,100, 102,103 
Xvii. 19-26 133 
xvii. 21-26 104 
xvii. 24 135 
Xvii. 25 268 
Xvii. 26 93 
xix. 31 96 
xix. 36 96 
xix. 41 102 
xx. 2 102 
xx. 13 102 
xx. 15 102 
Acts: 
li. 23 56 
ii. 38 346 
iii. 13-15 132 
iii. 17 132 
iii. 18 132 








INDEX OF TEXTS 


Acts: 
iii. 18, 19 57, 58 
iii. 19 483 
iii. 21 527 
iii. 26 57 
iv. 27 56 
y. 30 132 
v. 31 57, 58, 346 
Vili. 22 346 
viii. 32-35 56, 95 
x. 43 57 
xili. 38, 39 347 
Xvii. 22 315 
xxvi. 18, 20 347 
XXvili. 27 483 
Romans: 
13 79 
i. 18 274, 275 
j. 29-31 314 
ii. 5 274 
ii. 5-10 60 
ii. 8 274 
ii. 14 315 
ii. 16 60 
iii. 3, 4 273 
iii. 5 273, 274 
iii. 24 134 
lii. 25 60, 61, 63, 108 
lii. 25 sq. 134 
iii. 25, 26 273 
iv. 3 251, 379 
iv. 5 251 
iv. 7 347 
iv. 9 251 
iv. 10 251 
iv. 22 251 
iv. 25 67 
v.8 74, 429 
v. 8,9 276 
v.9 62, 79 
y. 10 59 
v. 12 317 
v. 12-19 308 
v. 15-19 66 
vy. 18 67 
v.19 295 
vi. 2 462 
vi. 3,4 370 
vi. 4, 5 69 
vi. 8 370 
vi. 11 370 
vi. 18 69 
vi. 20 463 
vi. 22 463 
vii. 6 69 








Romans: 
vii. 7-25 308 
viii. 1, 2 79 
viii. 3 63, 67 
viii. 3 sq. 134 
viii. 7 59 
viii. 21, 22 24 
viii. 26, 27 79, 441 
viii. 31-35 87 
viii. 32 63 
viii. 34 67 
viii. 39 463 
ix. 8 315 
ix. 22, 23 275 
9 67 
xi. 28 59, 276, 315 
xiii. 4 276, 277 
xiii. 5 27 
1 Corinthians: 
i, 24 300 
vy: 7 50, 62, 63, 95 
vi. 20 62, 134 
vii. 23 62, 134 
x.4 438 
xi. 23-26 48 
xiii. 281 
xiii. 3 460 
xv.3 55,58, 119, 134 
xv. 14, 15 67 
xv. 22 295, 308, 526 
xv. 28 526 
xv. 45 66 
2 Corinthians: 
i. 21 64 
v.10 60 
v. 14 370, 373 
v. 14, 15 66 
v.15 68, 291, 313, 373 
v. 18, 19 60 
v. 21 60, 67, 153, 379 
Galatians: 
i.4 24 
ii. 19, 20 69 
ii. 19-21 71 
ii. 20 63, 370 
iii. 6 251 
iii. 10 64 
iii. 13 62, 63, 184, 152; 
, 379 
iii. 17, 18 28 
iv. 4 67, 357 
iv. 5 62 
v.6 460 
vy. 19-23 314 





Ephesians: 
nee 134, 347 
i. 10 526 
ii. 3 274, 314 
ii. 4,5 277 
ii. 5, 6 370 
ii. 13-16 133 
ii. 16 60 
iii. 9-11 359 
iv. 32 347 
v. 2 63, 133, 464 
v.8 464 
v.9 464 
v. 25 sq. 133 
Philippians: 
ii. 8 67 
ii. 8,9 98 
ji. 10, 11 526 
iii. 9, 10 69 
Colossians: 
i. 14 347 
i. 15 300 
i. 15-18 359, 438 
i. 16 300 
i. 19, 20 438 
i. 20 134, 526 
i. 20, 21 60 
1. 21 59 
i, 24 133, 370 
ih, 83 301 
ii. 13 347 
ii. 20 69, 370 
rin a 370 
ili. 1 sq. 281 
iii. 3 69, 370, 464 
iii. 6 275, 277 
iii. 13 347 
2 Thessalonians: 
ii. 1-12 60 
ii. 6-8 60 
1 Timothy : 
ii. 4 521, 526 
ii. 6 101 
iv. 10 526 
vi. 16 511 
Titus: 
1.2 527 
ii. 11 526 
Hebrews: 
i. 2 80, 300 
ere 79, 88, 300 








INDEX OF TEXTS 


Hebrews: 

ii. 7 80 
ii. 9 76, 80 
ii. 10 76, 80, 201, 371, 

372 
Til, 13 372 
ii. 14 80, 372 
li. 14 sq 134 
ii. 15 140, 295, 372 
Oke Ll 76, 80, 83 
ii. 18 80, 295, 372 
iii. 3 80 
iii. 6 372 
iv. 15 80, 372 
Vian 134 
v. 1 sq. 133 
v.3 81, 134 
v.8 80, 372 
v.9 372 
v. 14 82 
vi. 1, 2 82 
vi. 2 90 
vi. 10 90 
vi. 18-20 372 
vi. 20 372 
vii. 3 81, 82 
vii. 5-10 82 
vii. 9 317 
vii. 11 81 
vii. 12 81 
vii. 16 81 
vii. 17 81 
vii. 18 80 
vii. 24 81 
vii. 25 87, 135, 441 
vii. 26-28 81 
vii. 27 134 
vii. 28 86 
viii. 1 82 
viii. 1, 2 17 
viii. 2 86, 87 
viii. 3 17, 82 
viii. 5 7 
viii. 5-13 81 
viii. 13 251 
ibe al 77 
ix. 5 61 
ix. 7-10 86 
ix. 9 85, 108 
1b¢5 Wal 77 
ix. 11-15 81 
ix. 11-24 86 
ix. 13, 14 80 
ix. 14 79, 82, 86, 88, 107 
ix. 15-20 133 
ix, 15-23 85 








545 
Hebrews: 
ix. 21-24 135 
Ix, 22 83 
1X. 22,23 79 
ix. 23 17, 85 
ix. 24 77, 86, 87 
ix. 26 88, 108, 134 
ix: 27 518, 520 
ix. 28 76, 83, 134 
x.1 77, 83 
x. 1-18 81 
Xe) 107 
x.3 85 
x. 4 88, 378 
x. 10 108 
x 12 83 
x. 14 108 
x. 18 83 
x. 19 135 
xe) 86 
x. 22 79, 83, 84, 86, 88 
x. 23 90 
x. 29 133 
x. 34 91 
rae 1 90 
> a) 7 
xi. 4 91 
xi. 6 90 
xi. 10 91 
xi. 16 91 
xi. 26 80 
xii. 2 46, 89, 372 
xii. 10 91 
xil. 14 91 
xii. 24 84 
xiii. 11, 12 86 
xiii. 13 372 
James: 
li. 23 251 
v. 19, 20 483 
1 Peter: 
re ala 120 
ji. 16 279 
i. 18 120, 134 
i. 19 95, 120 
ji. 22-25 95 
ji. 24 134 
iii. 18 120 
iii. 19, 20 520 
iy. 1 134 
iv. 6 520 
1 John: 
He 15) 280 
Tle ate 107, 108 


= Ve, 


546 


~s 


1 John: 


i.9 271, 280, 349, 476 


Tie dl 
Hi ol, 2 


441 


iii. 8 


iii. 16 94, 102, 104, 369 | 


iv. 8 

iv. 10 
iv. 16 
iv. 17 
v. 12 





110} 


107 


280 | 


94 


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future effort in the obscure fields of research into Christian origin.” 
—New York Tribune. 


“‘Dr. McGiffert has produced an able, scholarly, suggestive, and con- 
structive work. He is in thorough and easy possession of his sources and 
rmaterials, so that his positive construction is seldom interrupted by citations, 
the demolition of opposing views, or the irrelevant discussion of szbordinate 
questions.” — The Methodist Review. 


‘‘The clearness, self-consistency, and force of the whole impressica of 
Apostolic Christianity with which we leave this book, goes far to guaranres 
its permanent value and success.”— Zhe Lxpositar. 





— SBhe Internationa? Theofogica’ Library, 


eS 





——— 


THEOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 


By GEORGE B, STEVENS, D.D. 


Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale University, 





Crown 8vo, 480 pages, $2.50 net. 





¢?In style it is rarely clear, simple, and strong, adapted alike to the gen. 
ei! reader and the theological student. The former class will find it read- 
able and interesting to an unusual degree, while the student will value its 
thorough scholarship and completeness of treatment. His work has a sim- 
plicity, beauty, and freshness that add greatly to its scholarly excellence and 
worth.” —Christian Advocate. 


«Professor Stevens is a profound student and interpreter of the Bible, as 
far as possible divested of any prepossessions concerning its message. In 
his study of it his object has been not to find texts that might seem to bol- 
Ster up some system of theological speculation, but to find out what the 
writers of the various books meant to say and teach.”—V. Y. Tribune. 


*«Tt is a fine example of painstaking, discriminating, impartial research 
and statement.” — The Congregationalist. 


«Professor Stevens has given us a very good book. A liberal conser- 
vative, he takes cautious and moderate positions in the field of New Testa- 
ment criticism, yet is admirably fair-minded. His method is patient and 
tnorough. He states the opinions of those who differ from him with care 
and clearness. The proportion of quotation and reference is well adjusted 
and the reader is kept well informed concerning the course of opinion with- 
out being drawn away from the text of the author’s own thought. His 
judgments on difficult questions are always put with self-restraint and 
sobriety.” — Zhe Churchman. 


“<Tt will certainly take its place, after careful reading, as a valuable 
synopsis, neither bare nor over-elaborate, to which recourse will be had by 
the student or teacher who requires within moderate compass the gist of 
modern research.” —7Zhe Literary World. 


International Sheofogica Library. 
THE ANCIENT CATHOLIC CHURCH 


From the Accession of Trajan to the Fourth 
General Council (A.D. 98=451) 


By ROBERT RAINY, D.D. 
Principal of the New College, Edinburgh. 





Crown 8vo. 554 Pages. Net, $2.50. 


*¢ This is verily and indeed a book to thank God for; and if anybody has 
been despairing of a restoration of true catholic unity in God’s good time, it 
is a book to fill him with hope and confidence.” — The Church Standard, 

* Principal Rainy has written a fascinating book. He has the gifts of an 
historian and an expositor. His fresh presentation of so intricate and time- 
worn a subject as Gnosticism grips and holds the attention from first to last. 
Familiarity with most of the subjects which fall to be treated within these 
limits of Christian history had bred a fancy that we might safely and profit- 
ably skip some of the chapters, but we found ourselves returning to close up 
the gaps; we should advise those who are led to read the book through this 
notice not to repeat our experiment. It is a dish of well-cooked and well- 
seasoned meat, savory and rich, wiih abundance of gravy; and, while no 
one wishes to be a giutton, he will miss something nutritious if he does not 
take time to consume it all.” —A/ethodist Review. 


“Tt covers the period from 98-451 A.D., with a well-marked order, and 
is written in a downright style, simple and unpretentious. Simplicity, in- 
deed, and perspicuity are the keynotes, and too great burden of detail is 
avoided. A very fresh and able book.” —7he Nation. 


‘© The International Theological Library is certainly a very valuable collec- 
tion of books on the science of Theology. And among the set ~* good books, 
Dr. Rainy’s volume on The Ancient Catholic Church ‘s entitled to a high 
place. We know of no one volume which contains so much matter which 
is necessary to a student of theology.” — The Living Church. 


““ Of course, a history so condensed is not to be read satisfactorily in a day 
or even aweek. The reader often will find ample food for thought for a 
day or more in what he may have read in two hours. But the man who 
will master the whole book will be amply rewarded, and will be convinced 
that he has been consorting with a company of the world’s greatest men, 
and has attained an accurate knowledge of one of the world’s greatest and 
most important periods.” —Christian Intelligencer. 


“« As a compend of church history for the first five centuries, this volume 
will be found most useful, for ready reference, both to those who possess 
the more elaborate church histories, and for the general information desired 
by a wider reading public; while the temperate presentations of the author’s 
own theories upon disputed points are in themselves of great value.”— 
Bibliotheca Sacra, 


“Principal Rainy of the New College, Edinburgh, is one of the foremost 
scholars of Great Britain, and in Scotland, his home, he is regarded by his 
countrymen as the chief figure in their ecclesiastical life. There can be 
little doubt that this recent volume will enhance his reputation and serve to 
introduce him to a wider circle of friends.”-—Congregationalist, Boston. 








The Jnterrationa? Cheofogied? Zivrarv. 


History of Christian Doctrine. 


BY 


GEORGE P. FISHER, D.D., LL.D., 
Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Yale University. 





Crown 8vo, 583 pages, $2.50 net. 


“He gives ample proof of rarescholarship. Many of the old doc- 
trines are restated with a freshness, lucidity and elegance of style 
which make it a very readable book.”— The New York Observer. 


“Intrinsically this volume is worthy of a foremost place in our 
modern literature . . . Wehave no work onthe subject in English 
eoxal to it, for variety and range, clearness of statement, judicious 
guidance, and catholicity of tone.”—London Nonconformist and Inde- 
pendent. 


It is only just to say that Dr. Fisher has produced the best His- 
tory of Doctrine that we have in English.”"— 7he New York Evangelist. 


“Tt is to me quite a marvel how a book of this kind (Fisher’s 
‘History of Christian Doctrine’) can be written so accurately to 
scale, It could only be done by one who had a very complete com- 
mand of all the periods.” —Pror. WILLIAM SanDay, Oxjord. 


“Tt presents so many new and fresh points and is so thoroughly 
treated, and brings into view contemporaneous thought, especially 
the American, that it is a pleasure to read it, and will be an equal 
pleasure to go back to it again and again.” ——BisHop JoHN F. Hurst. 


““Throughout there is manifest wide reading, careful prepara- 
tion, spirit and good judgment,’— Philadelphia Presbyterian. 


“The language and style are alike delightfully fresh and easy 
. . . A book which will be found both stimulating and instructive 
to the student of theology.”— The Churchman. 


«« Professor Fisher has trained the public to expect the excellen- 
cies of scholarship, candor, judicial equipoise and admirable lucidity 
and elegance of style in whatever comes from his pen. But in the 
present work he has surpassed himself.”—Pror. J. H. THAYER, of 
Harvard Divinity School. 


«Tt meets the severest standard; there is fullness of knowledge, 
thorough research, keenly analytic thought, and rarest enrichment 
for a positive, profound and learned critic. There is interpretative 
and revealing sympathy. It is of the class of works that mark epochs 
in their several departments.” — The Outlook. 


“‘ As a first study of the History of Doctrine, Prefessor Fisher’s 
volume has the merit of being full, accurate and interesting.” 
—Prof. Marcus Dops 


“. . . He gathers up, reorganizes and presents the results of 
§nvestigation in a style rarely full of literary charm.” 
— The interior. 


The Internationa’ Theetogicar Library. 





CHRISTIAN INSTITUTIONS. 


By ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN, D.D. 


Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the Episcopal Theological Schor® 
in Cambridge. 


Crown 8vo, 577 pages, $2.50 net. 





«* Professor Allen’s Christian Institutions may be regarded as tht mos 
important permanent contribution which the Protestant Episcopal Church 
of the United States has yet made to general theological thought. In a few 
particulars it will not command the universal, or even the genera! assent of 
discriminating readers; but it will receive, as it deserves, the respect and 
appreciation of those who rightly estimate the varied, learned, and independ- 
ent spirit of the author.” —7he American Journal of Theology. 


‘* As to his method there can be no two opinions, nor as to the broad, 
critical, and- appreciative character of his study. It is an immensely sug- 
gestive, stimulating, and encouraging piece of work. It shows that modern 
scholarship is not all at sea as to results, and it presents a worthy view of a 
great and noble subject, the greatest and noblest of all subjects.”—7he Jn- 
dependent. 


‘«This will at once take its place among the most valuable volumes in the 
‘International Theological Library,’ constituting in itself a very complete 
epitome both of general church history and of the history of doctrines. 
ans A single quotation well illustrates the brilliant style and the pro- 
found thought of the book.” —Zhe Bibliotheca Sacra. 


‘«The wealth of learning, the historical spirit, the philosophic grasp, the 
loyalty to the continuity of life, which everywhere characterize this thorough 
study of the organization, creeds, and cultus constituting Christian Institu- 
tion, . . . However the reader may differ with the conclusions of the 
author, few will question his painstaking scholarship, judicial temperament, 
and catholicity of Christian spirit.”"—7he Advance. 


“‘Tt is an honor to American scholarship, and will be read by all who 
wish to be abreast of the age.” —The Lutheran Church Review. 


“‘ With all its defects and limitations, this is a most illuminating and sug- 
gestive book on a subject of abiding interest.”—TZhe Christian Jntelli- 
gencer.” 


“It is a treasury of expert knowledge, arranged in an orderly and lucid 
manner, and more than ordinarily readable. . . . It is controlled by the 
candid and critical spirit of the careful historian who, of course, has his 
convictions and preferences, but who makes no claims in their behalf which 
the facts do not seem to warrant.” — Zhe Congregationalist. 


‘* He writes in a charming style, and has collected a vast amount of im- 
portant material pertaining to his subject which can be found in no other 
work in so compact a form.” —=dde Vew York Observer 


The Internationa’ Theofogica’ Library. 





Apologetics; 
Or, Christianity Defensively Stated. 


By the late ALEXANDER BALMAIN BRUCE, D.D., 


Professor of Apologetics and New Testament Exegesis, Free Church College, 
Glasgow ; Author of ‘‘ The Training of the Twelve,’’ ‘‘ The Humilia- 
tion of Christ,’’ ‘‘ The Kingdom of God,” etc. 





Crown 8vo, 528 pages, $2.50 net. 





Professor Bruce’s work is not an abstract treatise on apologetics, 
but an apologetic presentation of the Christian faith, with reference 
to whatever in our intellectual environment makes faith difficult at 
the present time. 

It addresses itself to men whose sympathies are with Christianity, 
and discusses the topics of pressing concern—the burning questions 
of the hour. It is offered as an aid to faith rather than a buttress of 
received belief and an armory of weapons for the orthodox believer. 


“«“The book throughout exhibits the methods and the results of 
conscientious, independent, expert and devout Biblical scholarship, 
and it is of permanent value.” — The Congregationalist. 


‘The practical value of this book entitles it toa place in the 
first rank.” — The Independent. 


‘““A patient and scholarly presentation of Christianity under 
aspects best fitted to commend it to ‘ingeruous and truth-loving 
minds.’ ”— The Nation. 


“The book is well-nigh indispensable to those who propose to 
keep abreast of the times.” — Western Christian Advocate. 


‘Professor Bruce does not consciously evade any difficulty, 
and he constantly aims to be completely fair-minded. For this 
reason he wins from the start the strong confidence of the reader.” — 
Advance. 


“‘Tts admirable spirit, no less than the strength of its arguments, 
will go far to remove many of the prejudices or doubts of those who 
are outside of Christianity, but who are, nevertheless, not infidels.”— 
New York Tribune. 


“In a word, he tells precisely what all intelligent persons wish to 
know, and tells it in aclear, fresh and convincing manner. Scarcely 
anyone has so successfully rendered the service of showing what 
the result of the higher criticism is for the proper understanding of 
the history and religion of Israel.”— Andover Review. 


“«We have not for a long time taken a book in hand that is more 
stimulating to faith. . . . Without commenting further, we repeat 
that this volume is the ablest, most scholarly, most advanced, and 
sharpest defence of Christianity that has ever been written. Ne 
theological library should he without it.” — Zion's Herald. 


She Internationa? Theologica’ Library. 
Christian Ethics, 





By NEWMAN SMYTH, D.D., New Haven. 
Crown 8vo, 508 pages, $2.50 net. 


*« As this book is the latest, so it is the fullest and most avcractive 
treatment of the subject that we are familiar with. Patient and ex- 
haustive in its method of inquiry, and stimulating and suggestive in 
the topic it handles, we are confident that it will be a help to the 
task of the moral understanding and interpretation of human life.” 

— The Living Church. 


“This book of Dr. Newman Smyth is of extraordinary interest and 
value. It is an honor to American scholarship and American Chris- 
tian thinking. It is a work which has been wrought out with re- 
markable grasp of conception, and power of just analysis, fullness of 
information, richness of thought, and affluence of apt and luminous 
illustration. Its style is singularly clear, simple, facile, and strong. 
Too much gratification can hardly be expressed at the way the author 
lifts the whole subject of ethics up out of the slough of mere natural- 
ism into its own place, where it is seen to be illumined by the Chris- 
tian revelation and vision.” — Zhe Advance. 


“The subjects treated cover the whole field of moral and spiritual re- 
lations, theoretical and practical, natural and revealed, individual and social, 
civil and ecclesiastical. To enthrone the personal Christ as the true content 
of the ethical ideal, to show how this ideal is realized in Christian conscious: 
ness and how applied in the varied departments of practical life—these are 
the main objects of the book and no objects could be loftier.” 

— The Congregationalist. 


“‘ The author has written with competent knowledge, with great spiritual 
insight, and in a tone of devoutness and reverence worthy of his theme.” 
—The London Independent, 


“Tt is methodical, comprehensive, and readable; few subdivisions, 
direct or indirect, are omitted in the treatment of the broad theme, and 
though it aims to be an exhaustive treatise, and not a popular haidbook, it 
may be perused at random with a good deal of suggestiveness and profit.” 

—The Sunday School Times. 


«Tt reflects great credit on the author, presenting an exemplsry temper 
and manner throughout, being a model of clearness in thought and term, 
and containing passages of exquisite finish.” —Hariford Seminary Recoré. 


“«We commend this book to all reading, intelligent men, am! especj Uv 
to ministers, who will find in it many fresh suggestions.” 
—Proressor A. BE Brucp 


The Internationa’ Theofogicaf LiBrary. 


» 








THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR AND THE 
WORKING CHURCH 


By WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D.D., LL.D. 


Author of ‘‘ Applied Christianity,” ‘‘Who Wrote the Bible?” ‘“ Ruling 
Ideas of the Presen. Age,” etc. 


Crown 8vo, 485 pages, $2.50 net. 


«¢ Dr. Gladden may be regarded as an expert and an authority on practi- 
val theology. . . . Uponthe whole we judge that it will be of great 
service to the ministry of all the Protestant churches.” —TZhe [nterior. 


‘‘Packed with wisdom and instruction and a profound piety. . . . 
It is pithy, pertinent, and judicious from cover to cover. . . . An ex- 
ceedingly comprehensive, sagacious, and suggestive study and application 
of its theme.” — The Congregationalist, 


“« We have here, for the pastor, the most modern practical treatise yet 
published—sagacious, balanced, devout, inspiring.” —7he Dial. 


‘« His long experience, his eminent success, his rare literary ability, and 
his diligence as a student combine to make of this a model book for its pur- 
pose. . . - We know not where the subjects are more wisely discussed 
than here.” —TZhe Bibliotheca Sacra. 


“‘This book should be the vade mecum of every working pastor. It 
abounds in wise counsels and suggestions, the result of large experience 
and observation. No sphere of church life or church work is left untreated.” 
—The (Canadian) Methodist Magazine and Review. 


«« A happier combination of author and subject, it will be acknowledged, 
can hardly be found. . . . It is comprehensive, practical, deeply 
spiritual, and fertile in wise and suggestive thought upon ways and means 
of bringing the Gospel to bear on the lives of men.” —TZhe Christian Ad- 
vocate. 


“‘Dr. Gladden writes with pith and point, but with wise moderation, a 
genial tone and great good sense. . . . The book is written in an excel- 
lent, business-like and vital English style, which carries the author’s point 
and purpose and has an attractive vitality of its own.” —7Zhe Independent. 


«A comprehensive, inspiring, and helpful guide to a busy pastor. One 
Ends in it a multitude of practical suggestions for the development of the 
Spiritual and working life of the Church, and the answer to many problems 
that are a constant perplexity to the faithful minister.” 

The Christian Intelligencer 


The International Creal Commentary 





on the Golv Scriptures of the Old and 


New Testaments. 


EDITORS PREFACE. 





THERE are now before the public many Commentaries, 
written by British and American divines, of a popular or 
homiletical character. Zhe Cambridge Bible for Schools, 
the Handbooks for Bible Classes and Private Students, The 
Speaker's Commentary, The Popular Commentary (Schaff), 
The Expositor’s Bible, and other similar series, have their 
special place and importance. But they do not enter into 
the field of Critical Biblical scholarship occupied by such 
series of Commentaries as the Kurzgefasstes exegetisches 
Handbuch zum A. T.; De Wette’s Kurzgefasstes exegetisches 
Handbuch zum N. T.; Meyer's Kritisch-exegetischer Kom- 
mentar; Keil and Delitzsch’s Biblischer Commentar iiber das 
A. T.; Lange’s Theologisch-homiletisches Bibelwerk ; Nowack's 
Handkommentar zum A. T.; Holtzmann’s Mandkommentar 
zum N. T. Several of these have been translated, edited, 
and in some cases enlarged and adapted, for the English- 
speaking public; others are in process of translation. But 
no corresponding series by British or American divines 
has hitherto been produced. The way has been prepared 
by special Commentaries by Cheyne, Ellicott, Kalisch, 
Lightfoot, Perowne, Westcott, and others; and the time has 
come, in the judgment of the projectors of this enterprise, 
when it is practicable to combine British and American 
scholars in the production of a critical, comprehensive 


EDITORS PREFACE 


Commentary that will be abreast of modern biblical scholar- 
ship, and in a measure lead its van. 

Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York, and Messrs. 
T. & T. Clark of Edinburgh, propose to publish such a 
series of Commentaries on the Old and New Testaments, 
under the editorship of Prof. C. A. Briccs, D.D., in America, 
and of Prof. S. R. Driver, D.D., for the Old Testament, and 
the Rev. ALFRED PLumMMER, D.D., for the New Testament, 
in Great Britain. 

The Commentaries will be international and_ inter-con- 
fessional, and will be free from polemical and ecclesiastical 
bias. They will be based upon a thorough critical study of 
he original texts of the Bible, and upon critical methods of 
jnterpretation. They are designed chiefly for students and 
clergymen, and will be written in a compact style. Each 
book will be preceded by an Introduction, stating the results 
of criticism upon it, and discussing impartially the questions 
still remaining open. The details of criticism will appear 
in their proper place in the body of the Commentary. Each 
section of the Text will be introduced with a paraphrase, 
vr summary of contents. Technical details of textual and 
‘philological criticism will, as a rule, be kept distinct from 
matter of a more general character; and in the Old Testa- 
ment the exegetical notes will be arranged, as far as 
possible, so as to be serviceable to students not acquainted 
with Hebrew. The History of Interpretation of the Books 
will be dealt with, when necessary, in the Introductions, 
with critical notices of the most important literature of 
the subject. Historical and Archeological questions, as 
well as questions of Biblical Theology, are included in the 
plan of the Commentaries, but not Practical or Homiletical 
Exegesis. The Volumes will constitute a uniform series. 


THE INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL COMMENTARY. , 


Tue following eminent Scholars are engaged upon the Volumes 


named below: 


Genesis 


Exodus 
Leviticus 
Numbers 
Deuteronomy 
Joshua 


Judges 


Samuel 


Kings 


Chronicles 


Ezra and 
Nehemiah 


Psalms 


Proverbs 


Job 
Isaiah 
Isaiah 


Jeremiah 


Ezekiel 


Daniel 


Amos and Hosea 


Micah to Malachi 


Esther 


THE OLD TESTAMENT. 


The Rev. Joun SKINNER, D D., Professor of Old Tes- 
tament Language and Literature, College of Pres- 
byterian Church of England, Cambridge, England. 

The Rev. A. R. S. KennepDy, D.D., Professor of 
Hebrew, University of Edinburgh. 

J. F. Srennine, M.A., Fellow of Wadham College, 
Oxford. 

G. BucHANAN Gray. D.D., Professor of Hebrew, 
Mansfield College, Oxford. [Vow Ready, 

The Rev. S. R. Driver, D.D., D.Litt., Regius Pro- 
fessor of Hebrew, Oxford. [Vow Ready. 

The Rev. GEorGE ADAM SMITH, D.D., LL.D , Pro- 
fessor of Hebrew, Free Church College, Glasgow. 

The Rev. GeorcE Moore, D.D., LL.D., Professor of 
Theology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 

[Vow Ready. 

The Rev. H. P. Situ, D.D., Professor of Biblical 
History, Amherst College, Mass. [Vow Ready. 

The Rev. Francis Brown, D.D., D.Litt., LL.D., 
Professor of Hebrew and Cognate Languages, 
Union Theological Seminary, New York City. 

The Rev. Epwarp L. Curtis, D.D., Professor of 
Hebrew, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. 

The Rev. L. W. BATTEN, Ph.D., D.D., Rector of 
St. Marks Church, New York City, sometime 
Professor of Hebrew, P. E. Divinity School, 
Philadelphia. 

The Rev. Cuas. A. Briccs, D.D., D.Litt., Pro- 
fessor of Biblical Theology, Union Theological 
Seminary, New York. 

The Rev. C. H. Toy, D.D., LL D., Professor of 
Hebrew, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 

[Vow Ready. 

The Rev. S. R. Driver, D.D., D.Litt., Regius 
Professor of Hebrew, Oxford. 

Chaps. I-XXXIX. The Rev. S. R. DRIVER, D.D., 
D.Litt., Regius Professor of Hebrew, Oxford. 
Chaps. XL-LXVI.__The late Rev. Prof. A. B. 

Davipson, D.D., LL.D. 

The Rev. A. F. KirKpaTRICK, D.D., Master of 
Selwyn College, Regius Professor of Hebrew, 
Cambridge, England. 

By the Rev. G. A. Cooke, M.A., Fellow Mag- 
dalen College, and the Rev. CHARLES F, BURNEY, 
M.A., Fellow and Lecturer in Hebrew, St. Johns 
College, Oxford. 

The Rev. Joun P. Peters, Ph.D., D D., sometime 
Professor of Hebrew, P. E. Divinity School, 
Philadelphia, now Rector of St. Michael’s Church, 
New York City. 

W. R. Harper, Ph.D., LL D., President of the 
University of Chicago, Illinois. [Now Ready. 

W. R. Harper, Ph.D., LL D., President of the 
University of Chicago. 

The Rev. L. B. PATon, Ph.D., Professor of Hebrew, 
Hartford Theological Seminary. 


% 


She International Critical Commentary. 





Ecclesiastes 


Ruth 


Song of Songs 


and Lamentations 


St. Matthew 


St. Mark 


St. Luke 


St. John 


Harmony of the 
Gospels 


Acts 


Romans 


Corinthians 


Galatians 


Ephesians and 
Colossians 


Philippians and 
Philemon 


Thessalonians 


The Pastoral 
Epistles 


Hebrews 


St. James 


Peter and Jude 


The Epistles of 
St. John 


Revelation 





Prof. GrorGE A. BARTON, Ph.D., Professor of 
Biblical Literature, Bryn Mawr College, Pa. 

Rev. CHARLES P. FAGNANI, D.D., Associate Profes- 
sor of Hebrew, Union Theological Seminary, 
New York. 

Rev. CHARLES A. Brices, D.D., D.Litt., Professor of 
Biblical Theology, Union Theological Seminary, 
New York. 

THE NEW TESTAMENT. 


The Rev. WILLouGHBY C. ALLEN, M.A., Fellow of 
Exeter College, Oxford. 

The late Rev. E. P. Goutp, D.D., sometime 
Professor of New Testament Literature, P. E, 
Divinity School, Philadelphia. [Wow Ready. 

The Rev. ALFRED PLUMMER, D.D., sometime Master 
of University College, Durham. [Mow Ready. 

The Very Rev. JoHN Henry BERNARD, D.D., Dean 
of St. Patrick’s and Lecturer in Divinity, 
University of Dublin. 

The Rev. WiLt1AM Sanpay, D.D., LL.D., Lady 
Margaret Professor of Divinity, Oxford, and the 
Rev. WILLouGHBY C. ALLEN, M.A., Fellow of 
Exeter College, Oxford. 

The Rev. FreDERICK H. CHASE, Norissonian Pro- 
fessor of Divinity, President of Queens College 
and Vice-Chancellor, Cambridge, England. 

The Rev. WitLtaM Sanpay, D.D., LL.D., Lady 
Margaret Professor of Divinity and Canon of 
Christ Church, Oxford, and the Rev. A. C. 
HEADLAM, M.A., D.D., Principal of Kings College, 
London. [Wow Keady. 

The Right Rev. ArcH. RoBerTson, D.D., LL D., 
Lord Bishop of Exeter, and the Rev. RICHARD J. 
Know inG, D.D., Professor of New Testament 
Exegesis, Kings College, London. 

The Rev. Ernest D. Burton, D.D., Professor of 
New Testament Literature, University of Chicago. 

The Rev. T. K. Axszsotr, B.D., D.Litt., sometime 
Professor of Biblical Greek, Trinity College, 
Dublin, now Librarian of the same. [Vow Ready. 

The Rev. Marvin R. VINCENT, D.D., Professor of 
Biblical Literature, Union Theological Seminary, 
New York City. [Mow Ready. 

The Rev. JAMeEs E. FrAME, M.A., Associate Profes- 
sor in the New Testament, Union Theological 
Seminary, New York. 

The Rev. WALTER Lock, D.D., Warden of Keble 
College and Professor of Exegesis, Oxford. 

The Rev. A. Nairne, M.A., Professor of Hebrew 
in Kings College, London. 

The Rev. James H. Ropes, D.D., Bussey Professor of 
New Testament Criticism in Harvard University. 

The Rev. CHARLES Bice, D.D., Regius Professor 
of Ecclesiastical History and Canon of Christ 
Church, Oxford. [Wow Ready. 

The Rev. S. D. F. SALMonpD, D.D., Principal of the 
United Free Church College, Aberdeen. 

The Rev. Ropert H. Cuar tes, M.A., D.D., Profes- 
sor of Biblical Greek in the University of Dublin. 


The Znternational Critical Commentary, 





“4 decided advance on all other commentaries.’ — THE OUTLOOK. 


DEUTERONOMY. 


By the Rev. S. R. DRIVER, D.D., D.Litt., 
Regius Professor of Hebrew, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. 


Crown 8yvo. Net, $3.00. 


“No one could be better qualified than Professor Driver to write a critical 
and exegetical commentary on Deuteronomy. His previous works are author- 
ities in all the departments involved; the grammar and lexicon of the Hebrew 
tanguage, the lower and higher criticism, as well as exegesis and Biblical the- 
ology; ... the interpretation in this commentary is careful and sober in the 
main. A wealth of historical, geographical, and philological information illus- 
trates and elucidates both the narrative and the discourses. Valuable, though 
concise, excursuses are often given.” — The Congregationalist. 


“It is a pleasure to see at last a really critical Old Testament commentary 
in English upon a portion of the Pentateuch, and especially one of such merit. 
This I find superior to any other Commentary in any language upon Deuter- 
onomy.” — Professor E. L. Curtis, of Yale University. 


“ This volume of Professor Driver’s is marked by his well-known care and 
accuracy, and it will be a great boon to every one who wishes to acquire a 
thorough knowledge, either of the Hebrew language, or of the contents of the 
Book of Deuteronomy, and their significance for the development of Old Tes- 
tament thought. The author finds scope for displaying his well-known wide 
and accurate knowledge, and delicate appreciation of the genius of the 
Hebrew language, and his readers are supplied with many carefully con- 
structed lists of words and expressions. He is at his best in the detailed 
examination of the text.””— Zondon Atheneum. 


“Tt must be said that this work is bound to take rank among the best com- 
mentaries in any language on the important book with which it asals. On 
every page there is abundant evidence of a scholarly knowledge o-. the litera- 
ture, and of the most painstaking care to make the book useful to thorough 
students.” — The Lutheran Churchman. 


“The deep and difficult questions raised by Deuteronomy are, in every in- 
stance, considered with care, insight, and critical acumen. The student who 
wishes for solid information, or a knowledge of method and temper of the 
new criticism, will find advantage in consulting the pages ot Dr. Driver.” -— 
Zions Herald. 


The International Oritical Conumentary. 





“We believe this series to be of epoch-making importance.” 
— The N. Y. EVANGELIST. 


JUDGES. 


By Dr. GEORGE FOOT MOORE, D.D., 


_ Professor of Theology, Harvard University. 


Crown 8vo. Net, $3.00. 





“The typographical execution of this handsome volume is worthy of the 
scholarly character of the contents, and higher praise could not be given it.” 
— Professor C. H. Toy, of Harvard University. 


“This work represents the latest results of ‘Scientific Biblical Scholarship,’ 
and as such has the greatest value for the purely critical student, especially on 
the side of textual and literary criticism.” — Zhe Church Standard. 


“ Professor Moore has more than sustained his scholarly reputation in this 
work, which gives us for the first time in English a commentary on Judges not 
excelled, if indeed equalled, in any language of the world.” — Professor 
L. W. BatTEN, of P. E. Divinity School, Philadelphia. 


¢ Although a critical commentary, this work has ics practical uses, and by 
its divisions, headlines, etc., it is admirably adapted to the wants of all 
thoughtful students of the Scriptures. Indeed, with the other books of the 
series, it is sure to find its way into the hands of pastors and scholarly lay- 
men.” — Portland Zion’s Herald. 


“ Like its predecessors, this volume will be warmly welcomed — whilst to 
those whose means of securing up-to-date information on the subject of which 
it treats are limited, it is simply invaluable!” — Edinburgh Scotsman. 


“The work is done in an atmosphere of scholarly interest and indifference 
to dogmatism and controversy, which is at least refreshing. .. . Itisanoble 
introduction to the moral forces, ideas, and influences that controlled the 
period of the Judges, and a model of what a historical commentary, with a 
practical end in view should be.” — The Independent. 


“The work is marked by a clear and forcible style, by scholarly research, by 
critical acumen, by extensive reading, and by evident familiarity with the 
Hebrew. Many of the comments and suggestions are valuaie, whiie wae 
index at the close is serviceable and satisfactory.” — « A2/adelphia Presbyterian. 


“This volume sustains the reputation of the series for accurate and wide 
scholarship given in clear and strong English, . . . the scholarly reader will 
find delight in the perusal of this admirable commentary.” — Zion’s Herald. 


The Internationa? Critica? Commentary, 





“Richly helpful to scholars and ministers.”"—Tuz PRESBYTERIAN BANNER. 


The Books of Samuel 


BY 
REV. HENRY PRESERVED SMITH, D.D., 
Profess-e of Biblical History and Interpretation in Amherst College. 





Crown 8vo, Net $3.00. 


«Proressor Smith’s Commentary will for some time be the standard 
work on Samuel, and we heartily congratulate him on scholarly work sq 
faithfully accomplished.” — 7he Atheneum. 


“It is both critical and exegetical, and deals with original Hebrew and 
Greek. It shows painstaking diligence and considerable research.” — Zhe 
Presbyterian. 


“‘ The style is clear and forcible and sustains the well-won reputation of 
the distinguished author for scholarship and candor. All thoughtful stu- 
dents of the Scriptures will find the work helpful, not only on account of its 
specific treatment of the Books of Samuel, on which it is based, but because 
of the light it throws on and the aid it gives in the general interpretation of 
the Scriptures as modified by present-day criticism.” — The Philadelphia 
Press. - 


“The literary quality of the book deserves mention. We do not usually 
go to commentaries for models of English style. But this book has a dis- 
tinct, though unobtrusive, literary flavor. It is delightful reading. The 
translation is always felicitous, and often renders further comment need- 
less.” — The Evangelist. 


“The treatment is critical, and at the same time expository. Conserva- 
tive students may find much in this volume with which they cannot agree, 
but no one wishing to know the most recent conclusions concerning this 
part of sacred history can afford to be without it.” —Philadelphia Presby- 
terian Journal. ‘ 


“‘The author exhibits precisely that scholarly attitude which will com- 
mend his work to the widest audience.” — 7he Churchman. 


“‘The commentary is the most complete and minute hitherto published 
by an English-speaking scholar.” —Literature. 


“The volumes of Driver and Moore set a high standard for the Old 
Testament writers; but I think Professor Smith’s work has reached the 
same high level. It is scholarly and critical, and yet it is written in a spirit 
of reverent devotion, a worthy treatment of the sacred text.”—Pror. L. W. 
BatTTEN, of P. E. Divinity School, Philadelphia. 


The International Critical Commentary. 








“4 detided advance on ail other commentaries.” —THE OUTLOOK 


PROVERBS 


By the Rev. CRAWFORD H. TOY, D.D., LL.D. 


Professor of Hebrew in Harvard University. 


Crown 8vo. Net, $3.00. 





«Tn careful scholarship this volume leaves nothing to be desired. Its in- 
terpretation is free from theological prejudice. It will be indispensable to 
the careful student, whether lay ox clerical.” —Zhe Outlook. 


*« Professor Toy’s ‘Commentary’ will for many years to come remain a 
handbook for both teachers and learners, and its details will be studied with 
critical care and general appreciation.” — Zhe Atheneum. 


‘*The commentary itself is a most thorough treatment of each verse in 
detail, in which the light of the fullest scholarship is thrown upon the mean- 
ing. The learning displayed throughout the work is enormous. Here is a 
commentary at last that does not skip the hard places, but grapples with 
every problem and point, and says the best that can be said.” —Presbyterian 
Banner. 


*« Professor Toy’s commentary on Proverbs maintains the highest standard 
of the International Critical Commentaries. We can give no higher praise. 
Proverbs presents comparatively few problems in criticism, but offers large 
opportunities to the expositor and exegete. Professor Toy’s work is 
thorough and complete.” —Zhe Congregationalist. 


‘«This addition to ‘The International Critical Commentary’ has the same 
characteristics of thoroughness and painstaking scholarship as the preceding 
issues of the series. In the critical treatment of the text, in noting the 
various readings and the force of the words in the original Hebrew, it leaves 
nothing to be desired.” —TZhe Christian Intelligencer. 


‘« A first-class, up-to-date, critical and exegetical commentary on the Book 
of Proverbs in the English language was one of the crying needs of Biblical 
scholarship. Accordingly, we may not be yielding to the latest addition to 
the International Critical Series the tribute it deserves, when we say that it 
at once takes the first place in its class. That place it undoubtedly deserves, 
however, and would have secured even against much more formidable com- 
petitors than it happens te have. It is altogether a well-arranged, lucid 
exposition of this unique book in the Bible, based on a careful study of the 
text and the linguistic and historical background of every part of it.”—TZhe 
Interior. 


‘* While this commentary is called ‘critical’ and is such, it is not one in 
which the apparatus is spread out in detail; it is one which any intelli- 
gent English reader can readily use and thoroughly understand ”—7%e 
Evangelist. 


the Guternational Critical Commentary, 





“ We deem it as needful for the studious pastor to possess himself 
of these volumes as to obtain the best dictionary and encyclopedia.” 
— THE CONGREGATIONALIST. 


ST. MARK. 


By the Rev. E. P. GOULD, D.D., 
Late Professor of New Testament Exegesis, P. E. Divinity School, Philadelphia. 


Crown 8vo. Net, $2.50. 


“ v1 point of scholarship, of accuracy, of originality, this last addition to tur. 
series is worthy of its predecessors, while for terseness and keenness of exegesis, 
we should put it first of them all.” — The Congregationalist. 


“The whole make-up is that of a thoroughly helpful, instructive critica) 
study of the Word, surpassing anything of the kind ever attempted in thy 
English language, and to students and clergymen knowing the proper use ot 
a commentary it will prove an invaluable aid.” — The Lutheran Quarterly. 


“ Professor Gould has done his work well and thoroughly... . The com 
mentary is an admirable example of the critical method at its best... . Th» 
Word study . . . shows not only familiarity with all the literature of the sub 
ject, but patient, faithful, and independent investigation. ... It will ran). 
among the best, as it is the latest commentary on this basal Gospel.” — 7h» 
Christian Intelligencer. 


“Tt will give the student the vigorously expressed thought of a very thought 
ful scholar.” — The Church Standard. 


“Dr. Gould’s commentary on Mark is a large success, . . . and a credit te 
American scholarship. . .. He has undoubtedly.given us a commentary on 
Mark which surpasses all others, a thing we have reason to expect will be true 
in the case of every volume of the series to which it belongs.” — The Biblicat 
World. 


“The volume is characterized by extensive learning, patient attention to 
details and a fair degree of caution.” — Bibliotheca Sacra. 


“The exegetical portion of the book is simple in arrangement, admirable 
in form and condensed in statement... . Dr. Gould does not slavishly follow 
any authority, but expresses his own opinions in language both concise and 
clear.” — The Chicago Standard. 


“Tn clear, forcible and elegant language the author furnishes the results of 
the best investigations on the second Gospel, both early and late. He treats 
these various subjects with the hand of a master.” — Boston Zion's Herald. 


“The author gives abundant evidence of thorough acquaintance with the 
facts and history in the case. . . . His treatment of them is always fresh and 
scholarly, and oftentimes helpful.” = Ze Mew York Observer. 


The Gnternational Critical Commentary. 





“Tt ts hardly necessary to say that this series will stand first 
among all English serial commentaries on the Bible.” 
— THE BisiicaL WoRLD. 


ST. LUKE. 


By the Rey. ALFRED PLUIIFMER, D.D., 


Master of University College, Durham. Formerly Fellow and Senior Tator of 
Trinity College, Oxford, 


Crown 8vo. Net, $3.00. 


In the author’s Critical Introduction to the Commentary 1s contained a full 
reatment of a large number of important topics connected with the study of 
the Gospel, among which are the following: The Author of the Book — The 
Sources of the Gospel— Object and Plan of the Gospel— Characteristics, 
5tyle and Language —The Integrity of the Gospel—The Text — Literary 
History. 

FROM THE AUTHOR’S PREFACE. 


If this Commentary has any special features, they will perhaps be found in 
the illustrations from Jewish writings, in the abundance of references to the 
Septuagint, and to the Acts and other books of the New Testament, in the 
frequent quotations of renderings in the Latin versions, and in the attention 
which has been paid, both in the Introduction and throughout the Notes, to 
the marks of St. Luke’s style. 


“Tt is distinguished throughout by learning, sobriety of judgment, and 
sound exegesis. It is a weighty contribution to the interpretation of the 
Third Gospel, and will take an honorable place in the series of which it forms 
a part.” — Prof. D. D. SALMOND, in the Critical Review. 

“We are pleased with the thoroughness and scientific accuracy of the iater- 
pretations. ... Itseems to us that the prevailing characteristic of the book 
is common sense, fortified by learning and piety.” — 7he Herald and Presbyter. 

“An important work, which no student of the Word of God can safely 
neglect.” — The Church Standard. 

“The author has both the scholar’s knowledge and the scholar’s spirit 
necessary for the preparation of such a commentary.... We know of 
aothing on the Third Gospel which more thoroughly meets the wants of the 
Biblical scholar.” — The Outlook. 

‘The author is not only a profound scholar, but a chastened and reverent 
Christian, who undertakes to interpret a Gospel of Christ, so as to show 
Christ in his grandeur and loveliness of character.” — The Southern Church- 
wan. 

“Tt is a valuable and welcome addition to our somewhat scanty stock of 
first-class commentaries on the Third Gospel. By its scholarly thoroughness 
it well sustains the reputation which the INTERNATIONAL SERIES has already 
won.” — Prof. J. H. THAYER, of Harvard University. 

This volume having been so recently published, further notices are not yet 
evatlab.e, 


the Duternational Oritical Commentary, 








“ For the student this new commentary promises to be indispen 
sable.” — The MernHopist RECORDER. 


ROMANS. 


By the Rev. WILLIAM SANDAY, D.D., Libs 
¥ady Margaret Professor of Divinity, and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, 


AND THE 


Rey. A. C. HEADLAM, M.A., D.D., 
Principal of King’s College, London, 








Crown 8vo. Net, $3.00. 


“From my knowledge of Dr. Sanday, and from a brief examination of the 
book, I am led to believe that it is our best critical handbook to the Epistle. 
It combines great learning with practical and suggestive interpretation.” — 
Professor GEORGE B. STEVENS, of Yale University. 

“Professor Sanday is excellent in scholarship, and of unsurpassed candor, 
The introduction and detached notes are highly interesting and instructive. 
This commentary cannot fail to render the most valuable assistance to all 
earnest students. The volume augurs well for the series of which it is a mem- 
ber.” — Professor GEORGE P. FISHER, of Yale University. 

“The scholarship and spirit of Dr. Sanday give assurance of an interpreta- 
tion of the Epistle to the Romans which will be both scholarly and spiritual.” 
— Dr. LYMAN ABBOTT. 

“The work of the authors has been carefully done, and will prove an 
acceptable addition to the literature of the great Epistle. The exegesis is 
acute and learned ... The authors show much familiarity with the work 
of their predecessors, and write with calmness and lucidity.” —Wew York 
Observer. 

“ We are confident that this commentary will find a place in every thought- 
ful minister’s library. One may not be able to agree with the authors at some 
points, — and this is true of all commentaries, — but they have given us a work 
which cannot but prove valuable to the critical study of Paul’s masterly epis- 
tle.” — Zion’s Advocate. 

“ We do not hesitate to commend this as the best commentary on Romans 
yet written in English. It will do much to popularize this admirable and 
much needed series, by showing that it 1s possible to be critical and scholarly 
and at the same time devout and spiritual, and intelligible to plain Bible 
readers.” — The Church Standard. 

“A commentary with a very distinct character and purpose of its own, 
which brings to students and ministers an aid which they cannot obtain else- 
where. ... There is probably no other commentary in which criticism has 
been employed so successfully and impartially to bring out the author’s 
thought.” — WV. Y. Independent. 

“We have nothing but heartiest praise for the weightier matters of the 
commentary. It is not only critical, but exegetical, expository, doctrinal, 
practical, and eminently spiritual. The positive conclusions of the books are 
very numerous and are stoutly, gloriously evangelical. . . . The commentai 
does not fail to speak witt the utmost reverence of the whole word of God. 
The Congregationalisi 


the International Critical Commentary. 





“This admirable series.".—THE LONDON ACADEMY. 


EPHESIANS AND COLOSSIANS. 


By the Rev. T. K. ABBOTT, B.D., D. Litt. 


Formerly Professor of Biblical Greek, now of Hebrew, Trinity College, 
Dublin. 


Crown 8vo. Net, $2.50. 


‘¢ The latest volume of this admirable series is informed with the very 
best spirit in which such work can be carried out—a spirit of absolute 
fidelity to the demonstrable truths of critical science. . . . This summary 
of the results of modern criticism applied to these two Pauline letters is, 
for the use of scholarly students, not likely to be superseded.” —7Ze Lon- 
don Academy. 

«« An able and independent piece of exegesis, and one that none of us can 
afford to be without. It is the work of a man who has made himself mas- 
ter of his theme. His linguistic ability is manifest. His style is usually 
clear. His exegetical perceptions are keen, and we are especially grateful 
for his strong defence of the integrity and apostolicity of these two great 
monuments of Pauline teaching.” —T7he Exfos*tor. 

“Tt displays every mark of conscientious judgment, wide reading, and 
grammatical insight.’’— Literature. 

‘In discrimination, learning, and candor, it is the peer of the other vol. 
umes of the series. The elaborate introductions are of special value.”— 
Professor GEORGE B. STEVENS, of Yale University. 


“Tt is rich in philological material, clearly arranged, and judiciously 


handled. The studies of words are uncommonly good. . . . Inthe 
balancing of opinions, in the distinguishing between fine shades of mean- 
ing, it is both acute and sound.”—7Zhe Church. 


‘«The exegesis based so solidly on the rock foundation of philology is 
argumentatively and convincingly strong. A spiritual and evangelical tenor 
pervades the interpretation from first tolast. . . . These elements, to- 
gether with the author’s full-orbed vision of the truth, with his discrimina- 
tive judgment and his felicity of expression, make this the peer of any com- 
mentary on these important letters.” — Zhe Standard. 


«« An exceedingly careful and painstaking piece of work. The introduc: 
tory discussions of questions bearing on the authenticity and integrity (of 
the epistles) are clear and candid, and the exposition of the text displays a 
fine scholarship and insight.” —/VVorthwestern Christian Advocate. 


‘«The book is from first to last exegetical and critical. Every phrase in 
the two Epistles is searched as with lighted candles. The authorities for 
variant readings are canvassed but weighed, rather than counted. The mul- 
tiform ancient and modern interpretations are investigated with the ex- 
haustiveness of a German lecture-room, and the judicial spirit of an English 
court-room. Special discussions are numerous and thorough.”—TZzhe Con- 
epregationalist. 


She Internationa’ Critica? Commentary. 


SS 
‘ 





“7 have already expressed my conviction that the Inter. 
national Critical Commentary is the best critical commentary. 
on the whole Bible, in existence.’"-—Dr, LYMAN ABBOTT. 


Philippians and Philemon 


BY 


REV. MARVIN R. VINCENT, D.D. 
Professor of 2 "cai Literature in Union Theologicai Seminary, New York. 


Crown 8vo, Net $2.00. 





*«Tt is, in short, in every way worthy of the series.”— The Scotsman. 

‘« Professor Vincent’s Commentary on Philippians and Philemon appears 
to me not less admirable for its literary merit than for its scholarship and its 
clear and discriminating discussions of the contents of these Epistles.”—Dr. 
GEORGE P. FISHER. 


‘“«The book contains many examples of independent and judicial weigh- 
ing of evidence. We have been delighted with the portion devoted to Phile- 
mon. Unlike most commentaries, this may wisely be read as a whole.”— 
The Congregationalist 

‘©Of the merits of the work it is enough to say that it ts worthy of its 
place in the noble undertaking to which it belongs. It is ful? of just such 
information as the Bible student, lay or clerical, needs; and while giving an 
abundance of the truths of erudition to aid the critical student of the text, it 
abounds also in that more popular information which enables the attentive 
reader almost to put himself in St. Paul’s place, to see with the eyes and feel 
with the heart of the Apostle to the Gentiles.””—Boston Advertiser. 


“‘If it is possible in these days to produce a commentary which will be 
free from polemical and ecclesiastical bias, the feat will be accomplished in 
the International Critical Commentary. . . . It is evident that the writer 
has given an immense amount of scholarly research and original thought to 
the subject. . . . The author’s introduction to the Epistle to Philemon 
is an admirable piece of literature, calculated to arouse in the student’s mind 
an intense interest in the circumstances which produced this short letter from 
the inspired Apostle.” —Commercial Advertiser. 

‘‘His discussion of Philemon is marked by sympathy and appreciation, 
and his full discussion of the relations of Pauline Christianity to slavery are 
interesting, both historically and sociologically.””— The Dial. 


‘‘ Throughout the work scholarly research is evident. It commends itself 
by its clear elucidation, its keen exegesis which marks the word study on 
every page, its compactness of statement and its simplicity of arrangement.” 
—Lutheran World. 


‘‘ The scholarship of the author seems to be fully equal to hist dertaking, 
and he has given to us a fine piece of work. One cannot but sé that if the 
entire series shall be executed upon a par with this portion, thet ‘an be lit- 
tle left co be desired.”,— Philadelphia Presbyterian Journal, 


The Internationa’ Critical Commentary. 








“The best commentary and the one most useful to the Bible 
student is The International Critical.” 
—THE REFORMED CHURCH REVIEW. 


ST. PETER anpbD ST. JUDE 


By the Rev. CHARLES BIGG, D.D. 
Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford 


Crown 8yo. Net, $2.50. 


*« His commentary is very satisfactory indeed. His notes are particularly 
valuable. We know of no work on these Epistles which is so full and satis- 
factory.” —TZhe Living Church, 

«Tt shows an immense amount of research and acquaintanceship with the 
views of the critical school.” —erald and Presbyter. 

, ‘This volume well sustains the reputation achieved by its predecessors, 
The notes to the text, as well as the introductions, are marked by erudition 
at once affluent and discriminating.” — The Outlook. 

**Canon Bigg’s work is pre-eminently characterized by judicial open- 
mindedness and sympathetic insight into historical conditions. His realistic 
interpretation of the relations of the apostles and the circumstances of the 
early church renders the volume invaluable to students of these themes. 
The exegetical work in the volume rests on the broad basis of careful lin- 
guistic study, acquaintance with apocalyptic literature and the writings of 
the Fathers, a sane judgment, and good sense.”—American Journal of 
Theology. 


NUMBERS 


By the Rev. G. BUCHANAN GRAY, D.D. 
Professor of Hebrew, Mansfield College, Oxford. 


Crown 8vo. Net, $3.00. 


“*Most Bible readers have the impression that ‘Numbers’ is a dull 
book only relieved by the brilliancy of the Balaam chapters and some 
snatches of old Hebrew songs, but, as Prof. Gray shows with admi- 
rable skill and insight, its historical and religious value is not that 
which lies on the surface. Prof. Gray’s Commentary is distinguished 
by fine scholarship and sanity of judgment; it is impossible to 
commend it too warmly.”—Saturday Review (London). 


Ihe Znternational Critical Commentary. 





AMOS AND HOSEA. 


By WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER, Ph.D., LL.D. 


Professor of Semitic Languages and Literatures in the University of Chicago. 
Crown 8vo. Net, $3.00. Postage, 20 cents. 


“‘ His book combines thorough technical scholarship with large measure of 
ethical and spiritual insight, and we think his Commentary on Amos and Hosea 
will take its place among the best in this very excellent series.” — The Outlook. 


“It is unnecessary to say that in scholarly completeness, Dr. Harper’s volume 
ranks with the best of the International Critical Commentary Series.” — 7he 
Standard, . 


“The commentary is remarkable for its clear analysis, and exhaustive in its 
minute completeness. It furnishes materials to the student from which he may 
form his own judgment rather than seeks to impress dogmatic conclusions.” 
— The Watchman. 


“JT think it safe to say that in no language can there be found such a 
scholarly piece of work on the two important prophets, Amos and Hosea.” — 
Rey. L. W. Barren, Ph.D., D.D., Rector of St. Mark’s Church, New York 
City, sometime Professor of Hebrew, P. E. Divinity School, Philadelphia. 


“Professor Harper’s critical position is that of sound progressive scholar- 
ship. He possesses also the gift of the true teacher of interesting others in 
his subject. The volume will easily take its place as a most important com- 
mentary on these prophets.” — Congregationalist. 


«T shall have pleasure in recommending it to all students in our Seminary. 
This book fills, in the most favorable manner, a long-felt want for a good 
critical commentary on two of the most interesting books in the Old 
Testament.” — Rev. Lewis B. PATON, Ph.D., Professor of Hebrew, Hartford 
Theological Seminary. 


“He has gone, with characteristic minuteness, not only into the analysis 
and discussion of each point, endeavoring in every case to be thoroughly 
exhaustive, but also into the history of exegesis and discussion, Nothing at 
all worthy of consideration has been passed by. The consequence is that 
when one carefully studies what has been brought together in this volume, 
either upon some passage of the two prophets treated, or upon some question 
of critical or antiquarian importance in the introductory portion of the volume, 
one feels that he has obtained an adequately exhaustive view of the subject.” 
— The Interior. 


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